IT’S THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR
BECAUSE IT IS ABOVE ALL ELSE – A MOVIE – PURE, STRONG AND SOUND.– ROGER EBERT
IT’S SERIOUS AND SUBSTANTIVE, INGENIOUSLY WRITTEN AND EXECUTED.
IT’S SUPERBLY CRAFTED AND DARKLY FUNNY WITH PITCH-PERFECT PERFORMANCES.

– ANN HORNADAY

– CLAUDIA PUIG

IT GETS EVERY CINEMATIC DETAIL RIGHT.
IT NABS YOU AT THE START AND NEVER MAKES A WRONG MOVE.

Visual effects have transcended genres
to become a seamless part of the plot.

The original score race has four composers who
have never won, plus a veteran who has ﬁve Oscars.

Film editors discuss the critical cutting
choices they made in pivotal scenes.

Adapting a book for the screen requires a steady hand.

The nominated scribes talk about what
their original screenplays required.

The red carpet often precedes the catwalk
when it comes to making a sartorial splash.

The race for the Academy Award 50 years ago
looks surprisingly similar to this year.

glaad award
nominee

THE YEAR’S MOST HONORED

WINNER

CHICAGO FILM CRITICS
ASSOCIATION

WINNER

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE
®

DALLAS-FT. WORTH FILM
CRITICS ASSOCIATION

WINNER

ONLINE FILM
CRITICS

WINNER

LAS VEGAS FILM CRITICS
SOCIETY

WINNER

DENVER FILM CRITICS
SOCIETY

WINNER

ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM
JOURNALISTS

WINNER

SAN DIEGO FILM
CRITICS SOCIETY

04

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

To meet the artists and experience an interactive
video, interviews, slideshows and more, go

ACHIEVEMENT IN ANIMATED ARTISTRY

WINNER

SAN FRANCISCO FILM
CRITICS CIRCLE

WINNER

SOUTHEASTERN FILM CRITICS
ASSOCIATION

WINNER

BOSTON ONLINE FILM
CRITICS ASSOCIATION

WINNER

UTAH FILM CRITICS
ASSOCIATION

WINNER

TORONTO FILM CRITICS
ASSOCIATION

There’s nothing wrong
with being scared Norman,
so long as you don’t let it
change who you are.

WINNER

VILLAGE VOICE FILM
CRITICS POLL

WINNER

CENTRAL OHIO FILM CRITICS
ASSOCIATION

WINNER
WASHINGTON DC AREA FILM
CRITICS ASSOCIATION

look at the artistry behind “ParaNorman,” with
to: www.focusguilds2012.com/pnbooklet

WASHINGTON DC AREA FILM
CRITICS ASSOCIATION

POll
POsiTiON
BY PeTe HaMMOND

The Academy’s First Foray Into Online Voting Hasn’t Been Without Some Nail-Biting Moments
This year the big question hasn’t been exactly who
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
members are going to vote for, it has been instead
whether they can ﬁgure out how to vote at all.
With the advent of online voting for the ﬁrst time
in Academy history, the path during the nomination balloting hasn’t been a smooth one for many
voters. Some found that the Academy’s security steps,
necessary to avoid hackers, have also kept voters out,
forcing them to make repeated attempts at getting
their ballot completed.
Although all the guilds and other voting groups have
moved full force into the world of online voting, the
Academy went through a slow, methodical process
before ﬁnally settling on Everyone Counts, a company
known for working with the U.S. government in a similar
capacity. Unlike most industry groups, the Academy is
a prime target for inﬁltration by cyber terrorists who
would like nothing more than to gain access to vote
totals and embarrass the high-proﬁle Oscar process,
which in 85 years has never been compromised.
But keeping voting hacker-proof caused its own set of
issues, when in November the Academy had to extend
its registration period after member complaints. After
that, AMPAS also backed down and agreed to send
an old-fashioned paper ballot to any member who
had paid their dues but hadn’t bothered or didn’t
know how to register for online voting. All along,
the Academy offered paper ballots as an alternative
but initially had required a one-time registration for
those as well—something longtime members used to
getting ballots in the mail automatically didn’t realize.

06

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

Many voters said they were able to vote online
with no problems, but a large and very vocal group
complained that they were locked out of the system
and had to spend valuable time trying to vote over the
course of two or three days.
Although the Academy sent out repeated email
reminders, provided a ’round-the-clock phone
number for member support, and set up kiosks in
the lobby of its Beverly Hills headquarters, some
members experienced great frustration. However, as
president Hawk Koch told me on the morning of the
Oscar nominations, the turnout was still the largest
the Academy had seen for nominations in several
years. But he also said nothing was perfect on a ﬁrst
try. And before ﬁnal voting began on Feb. 8 (ballots
are due back on Feb. 19), the Academy sent members
a detailed—some might say too complex—guidebook
on how to accomplish online voting. The Academy
also sent out emails offering the option of a paper
ballot to anyone who wants one. From my admittedly
nonscientiﬁc sample survey, a lot of members took
them up on the offer by the deadline of Feb. 1.
For those determined to enter the brave new world
of electronic Oscar voting, the Academy told them
they will need four things: 1) A voter identiﬁcation
number; 2) A voting password (not to be confused with
their member password and one that must contain a
mix of letters, numbers, and a special character); 3)
A security code; and 4) A telephone where voters will
receive their special code by text after entering their
VIN and password.

The Academy’s E Voter Guide then takes the voter
step by step into how to actually cast their ballot once
they have successfully logged into the system in the
ﬁrst place. Some members told me it took them two
or three tries after getting locked out for a 24-hour
period to actually ﬁnish the task during nominations.
If you try a password too many times, and it doesn’t
work, you have to call the Academy support line to
get a new one.
Certainly Academy ofﬁcials, who took great care
before embarking on this new adventure for Oscar,
are hoping this will get easier with time. It took the
Screen Actors Guild seven years before they were
comfortable that it was running smoothly enough to
eliminate paper ballots. The Academy is dealing with
a membership that might not be so tech savvy. But
for an organization that is such a tempting target for
hackers, it is not an easy task, and the option of paper
ballots will probably be around for a long time. “Please
tell them, just send me a paper ballot. I’m begging,”
one Oscar-nominated longtime member told me.

‘‘

The bottom line is, if you want to vote, you will be
able to vote. “What I can say is, we will not jeopardize
the integrity of the Oscar ballot. We will make sure
that everybody can vote,” Koch told me.

Please Tell
THeM, JusT seND Me a
PaPeR BallOT.
i’M BeGGiNG.

ACADEMY AWARD®
NOMINEE

BEST
ORIGINAL
SCREENPLAY

WES ANDERSON &
ROMAN COPPOLA

SPIRIT AWARD
NOMINEE

BEST
ORIGINAL
SCREENPLAY

WES ANDERSON &
ROMAN COPPOLA

WRITERS GUILD
NOMINEE

BEST
ORIGINAL
SCREENPLAY

WES ANDERSON &
ROMAN COPPOLA

WHAT KIND OF
”
BIRD ARE YOU?

“

—Sam Shakusky

I was consciously trying to capture a sensation, which is
that emotion of when you’re a 12-year-old and you fall in love.”
“

WES ANDERSON

Directed by Wes Anderson
Written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola

To experience the illustrated screenplay for this year’s most original motion picture, go to focusguilds2012.com/mrkscript

THe HOMe

sTReTCH
The Oscar Ceremony Is
Poised to Offer Several
Twists and Turns For
Awards Watchers

argo

Can’t we just end all this suspense
about winners or losers and call it one
massive tie this year? The 2012 crop of
Oscar nominees, and ﬁlms in general,
is so impressively dense with quality it
seems a shame the Academy has to pick
just one winner in each category. But
that’s the name of the game we play
this time of year, and with ballots going
out just as I had to turn this piece in, it
is still a ﬂuid situation as to just what
the ﬁnal results will be. With so many
movies spread across many categories
that are genuine contenders, a split
vote resulting in some surprising twists
and turns is possible, even though the
various guild awards give a strong clue
about industry sentiment. If the past
is any indication, I am aware some
readers might take these predictions as
gospel and bet the farm on it in their
Oscar pools, so I offer a disclaimer
before we begin. I am not responsible
for any monetary loss you might incur,
nor do I expect 10% of any winnings.
I am just trying to read the winds of
Oscar after several months of analyzing every tea leaf. Here is where I have
a hunch it stands, but try to check back
for the online edition of this piece for
any last-minute updates or changes.
I anticipate I will be talking to many
voters right up until the big night and
reserve the right to tweak.

BY PeTe HaMMOND

08

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

BesT PiCTuRe
All season long, this has been about as wide open
a race, and as competitive a ﬁeld of contenders, as
we have seen in many years. With nine nominees,
the same number as last year, it has taken a while to
ﬁgure out a sureﬁre winner. But with key awards from
the PGA, DGA, and SAG, in addition to best picture
honors at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice
Movie Awards, Argo has clearly emerged as the frontrunner, a remarkable turn of events considering its
director, Ben Afﬂeck, was snubbed by the Academy’s
directing branch Jan. 10. Oh, what a difference a few
weeks makes. The big question is, can the Warner
Bros. juggernaut maintain momentum and win
Oscar’s top prize, even without that directing nomination? If so, it would be only the second ﬁlm to win
without a directing nom, following Driving Miss Daisy’s
feat at the 1990 ceremony. With the best picture
category holding the strongest possibility for success
among Argo’s seven nominations, could it actually win
here and nowhere else? Not likely, but it’s possible,
especially in a year in which I think the Academy will
be spreading the wealth. Lincoln, with a leading 12
nominations (a good, if not always correct, indicator),
Silver Linings Playbook, and Life of Pi are probably still
in the mix here as well but….
THe WiNNeR: Argo
THe COMPeTiTiON: Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild,
Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln,
Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty

BesT aCTOR
This is Daniel Day-Lewis’ to lose at this point. Playing
such a well-known biographical ﬁgure is, of course, a
big plus. But Day-Lewis brought a lot to the table and
remains the guy to beat in an impossibly ﬁne ﬁeld of
contenders. Day-Lewis’ biggest drawback is that he
has already won this prize twice, and a third would
be unprecedented for lead actors in Oscar history.
Also no actor has ever won an Oscar for playing a
U.S. president, another potential ﬁrst. The Academy
might want to reward equally deserving newcomers to the category like Hugh Jackman or Bradley

Cooper instead, but judging from the pile of precursor awards Day-Lewis has already won, it looks like
you can bet a very large pile of $5 bills that he will
make Oscar history with honest Abe.
THe WiNNeR: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
THe COMPeTiTiON: Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings
Playbook; Hugh Jackman, Les Misérables; Joaquin
Phoenix, The Master; Denzel Washington, Flight

BesT aCTRess
I got this one wrong last year when Meryl Streep
(The Iron Lady) beat Viola Davis (The Help), and this is
another tough one. The race for lead actress is hotly
competitive, with both Silver Linings Playbook’s Jennifer
Lawrence and Zero Dark Thirty’s Jessica Chastain
claiming other early awards and also impressing with
strong performances. Plus, never underestimate the
so-called “babe factor” (thanks to the Academy’s
dominant male membership) that this category
often, but not always, favors. And a win here for
either one could be a chance to give either of their
movies an important award, while shutting them out
elsewhere. The real wild card in this race is 85-yearold Emmanuelle Riva, whose performance in the
foreign language ﬁlm Amour has been widely praised
and admired, particularly by her fellow actors, who
comprise the Academy’s largest voting block. As the
oldest best actress nominee ever (she actually turns
86 on Oscar Sunday), she could trigger a sentimental
factor and a feeling that the others will have another
shot someday. SAG champ Lawrence probably has
the edge and is where the smart money’s going, but
a split in this very ﬂuid category could provide one
of the evening’s most interesting stories. So going out
on a limb….
THe WiNNeR: Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
THe COMPeTiTiON: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark
Thirty; Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook;
Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild;
Naomi Watts, The Impossible

Emmanuelle Riva in amour

Robert De Niro in Silver linings Playbook

Anne Hathaway in les Misérables

BesT suPPORTiNG aCTOR

BesT DiReCTOR

In a category of ﬁve former Oscar winners (a ﬁrst
indeed), I could actually see ﬁve different, and logical,
results. Christoph Waltz took the Golden Globe,
Philip Seymour Hoffman was the Critics Choice, and
Tommy Lee Jones won at SAG. Alan Arkin is playing
an industry insider in the enormously popular Argo,
and the Weinstein Co. has been effectively reminding
everyone Robert De Niro hasn’t won an Oscar in 32
years or even been nominated in 21 years. He’s coming
up on the outside as Silver Linings Playbook has become
a sizable hit. Truly, toss a coin here. There’s no true
frontrunner, and a logical route to victory is possible
for each one of these veterans.

With the quirky director’s branch going out of their
way to snub DGA nominees Kathryn Bigelow, Tom
Hooper, and DGA winner Ben Afﬂeck, we know for
sure we can’t count on the usual spot-on correlation
between the DGA winner and the eventual victor in
this category. Afﬂeck actually would have been my
prediction to win here, but, alas, he’s not even nominated, which means voters might very well be splitting
their vote for director and picture this year—certainly
not unheard of in recent years but increasingly rare.
As directors of the two ﬁlms with the most nominations, Steven Spielberg for Lincoln and Ang Lee for
Life of Pi, are the likely frontrunners, with Silver Linings
Playbook’s David O. Russell coming up on the outside.
If initial frontrunner Lincoln has been eclipsed in the
best picture race, this is the place voters could come to
kneel at the Spielberg-ian altar. Or not. Lee’s triumph
in even managing to bring the “unﬁlmable” Pi to the
screen just screams “directing,” and that could play
very well here.

BesT suPPORTiNG aCTRess
Like the best actor race, this one has a clear frontrunner in Les Misérables’ Fantine, Anne Hathaway.
Having won just about every precursor award including SAG, it looks like this year Hathaway will make
it to Oscar’s stage without hosting the show. A video
parody of her moving performance singing the signature, “I Dreamed a Dream” went viral but shouldn’t
stand in her way. If any of the other contenders have
a shot, it’s deﬁnitely Lincoln’s Mary Todd, Sally Field.
We know Oscar likes her—they really, really like her
(she’s won twice)—but it appears to be Hathaway’s
year in the winner’s circle.
THe WiNNeR: Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
THe COMPeTiTiON: Amy Adams, The Master; Sally Field,
Lincoln; Helen Hunt, The Sessions; Jacki Weaver, Silver
Linings Playbook

BesT aDaPTeD sCReeNPlaY
This is a very tough category with several worthy
entries, all best picture nominees. Pulitzer Prize- and
Tony-winning playwright Tony Kushner’s herculean efforts in ﬁnding the right tone and approach
to Lincoln are well chronicled, and he has the solid
endorsement of Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of
the book Team of Rivals from which he drew a lot of
source material. He is the frontrunner, even if Argo
takes picture over his ﬁlm. On the other hand, Chris
Terrio’s meticulous, and tricky, work on Argo is impres-

Daniel Day-Lewis in lincoln

sive, and voters might want to reward the ﬁlm’s script,
especially if they are voting it best picture. That is
usually how it works, but this is a weird year. David O.
Russell’s funny and moving adaptation of Silver Linings
is another strong possibility, but the real battle here
is likely Lincoln versus Argo, and it actually could go
either way. Take a shot.
THe WiNNeR: Chris Terrio, Argo
THe COMPeTiTiON: Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar,
Beasts of the Southern Wild; David Magee, Life of Pi; Tony
Kushner, Lincoln; David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

BesT ORiGiNal sCReeNPlaY
This is another category that seems widely split
with no obvious frontrunner. But the three likeliest contenders would appear to be Django Unchained,
Zero Dark Thirty, and Amour, considering all three are
also best picture nominees, and that would indicate
more widespread support among the entire Academy,
which gets to vote in the ﬁnals. Both Quentin
Tarantino’s Django and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty
have been hit by controversy over their respective
elements of treatment of slaves and use of torture,
giving both of those former winners in this category
more of an uphill climb to overcome negative publicity. That leaves an opening for the widely admired
Amour, which could become the ﬁrst to win both best
foreign language ﬁlm and original screenplay since
Claude Lelouch’s 1966 ﬁlm A Man and a Woman, a
movie that, like Amour, also happened to star the great
Jean-Louis Trintignant.
THe WiNNeR: Michael Haneke, Amour
THe COMPeTiTiON: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained;
John Gatins, Flight; Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola,
Moonrise Kingdom; Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty

Continued on next page...

THe HOMe sTReTCH
...from previous

anna karenina

Wreck-it ralph

THe OTHeR CaTeGORies:
BesT FOReiGN laNGuaGe FilM

BesT PRODuCTiON DesiGN

BesT FilM eDiTiNG

A strong group of movies, but the other four nominees have the misfortune of being named in a year
that also includes Amour, which despite being a French
ﬁlm is actually the Austrian entry because of the
nationality of its director, Michael Haneke. Winner
of the Palme d’Or and just about every precursor
prize this year, as well as being only the ﬁfth ﬁlm in
Oscar history in this category also to be up for best
picture, it would appear to be unbeatable here. But
if any category has offered surprises in recent years,
it is this one.

If there were a production more beautifully designed
this year than Anna Karenina, I am not sure what it is,
but reaction overall to the movie was mixed, meaning
large-scale best picture nominees Les Misérables, Life of
Pi, or Lincoln might sneak past it, but which one?

This is sometimes a category where voters go their
own way, such as last year when non-best picture
nominee The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo shocked the
frontrunners here and won its one and only Oscar
in a bit of a surprise. This year, all ﬁve nominees are
also up for picture, so it should follow more closely to
tradition. Because of its technical challenges, Life of
Pi’s chances cannot be discounted, but this seems a
place also to honor Argo for its tricky dance with tone
and pace, although its editor William Goldenberg is
competing with himself for Zero Dark Thirty. Still….

THe WiNNeR: Amour (Austria)
THe COMPeTiTiON: Kon-Tiki (Norway), No (Chile), A
Royal Affair (Denmark), War Witch (Canada)

BesT aNiMaTeD FeaTuRe
Tim Burton, whose Frankenweenie was a critical hit
but a boxofﬁce disappointment, is overdue for Oscar
recognition, and this one might be his most personal
ﬁlm yet. However, there are two other stopmotion
entries in the category, including the acclaimed
ParaNorman, which has been campaigned heavily,
and the highly underrated and hilarious Aardman
’toon The Pirates, which by comparison has been well
hidden by Sony. Two other Disney entries—Pixar’s
Brave, which won the Golden Globe, and Disney
Animation’s Wreck-It-Ralph, which triumphed at the
PGA and Annies—could help split the studio vote
with Frankenweenie, but I doubt it.
THe WiNNeR: Wreck-It-Ralph
THe COMPeTiTiON: Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman,
The Pirates! Band of Misﬁts

BesT DOCuMeNTaRY FeaTuRe
A deserving group of nominees dealing with heavyweight topics are likely to lose to a fascinating and
very human musical documentary about the resurrection of a singer long given up for dead who ﬁnally
ﬁnds fame in the most unlikely of ways.
THe WiNNeR: Searching for Sugar Man
THe COMPeTiTiON: 5 Broken Cameras, The Gatekeepers,
How to Survive a Plague, The Invisible War

BesT CiNeMaTOGRaPHY
Life of Pi is considered a masterful technical achievement, and one of its chief attributes is Claudio Miranda’s
stunning cinematography, which blends the CGI
world with the real and makes it all a cohesive whole.
THe WiNNeR: Life of Pi, Claudio Miranda
THe COMPeTiTiON: Seamus McGarvey, Anna Karenina;
Robert Richardson, Django Unchained; Janusz
Kaminski, Lincoln; Roger Deakins, Skyfall

BesT COsTuMe DesiGN
Two of the nominees here really scream costume
design and deliver on all fronts: Mirror Mirror from
the late Eiko Ishioka and Snow White and the Huntsman
from frequent winner Colleen Atwood. There are
also two more high-proﬁle best picture nominees in
the mix—Lincoln and Les Misérables—but this category
often marches to the beat of its own drum, and this
year the stunning work from Jacqueline Durran for
Anna Karenina will likely stand above the rest when
voters sit down to assess these contenders.
THe WiNNeR: Anna Karenina, Jacqueline Durran
THe COMPeTiTiON: Les Misérables, Paco Delgado;
Lincoln, Joanna Johnston; Mirror Mirror, Eiko Ishioka;
Snow White and the Huntsman, Colleen Atwood

BesT MaKeuP aND HaiRsTYliNG
This one’s almost a tossup, but Peter Jackson’s return
to Middle Earth probably has an advantage just
because of the very nature of the ﬁlm—unless voters
want to reward the changing looks of Jean Valjean
and Fantine in Les Mis.
THe WiNNeR: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Peter
Swords King, Rick Findlater, and Tami Lane
THe COMPeTiTiON: Hitchcock, Howard Berger, Peter
Montagna, and Martin Samuel; Les Misérables, Lisa
Westcott and Julie Dartnell

BesT ORiGiNal MusiC sCORe
Of course Lincoln’s John Williams is a perennial
nominee and winner already of ﬁve Oscars, while
Skyfall’s 11-time nominee Thomas Newman is still
looking for his ﬁrst. But I have a feeling it’s between
the masterful mix of Middle Eastern strains and
orchestral score that Alexandre Desplat pulled off in
Argo versus ﬁrst-time nominee Mychael Danna, who
earned a nom for his elegant and stirring score in Life
of Pi, as well as an original song nom.
THe WiNNeR: Life of Pi, Mychael Danna
THe COMPeTiTiON: Anna Karenina, Dario Marianelli;
Argo, Alexandre Desplat; Lincoln, John Williams;
Skyfall, Thomas Newman

open Heart

BesT sONG
Oscar host Seth MacFarlane cowrote one of the
nominated songs, the sprightly tune from Ted, and it
has a shot because it is the type of upbeat melody
that has won here in recent years. If a Muppet can
win last year, why not a stuffed bear? The one and
only original song in Les Mis, “Suddenly” isn’t all
that memorable compared to the rest of the score.
We’re going with the frontrunner and Golden Globe
winner, Skyfall, which should make Adele the latest
pop star to successfully inﬁltrate this category. It also
would be the ﬁrst-ever James Bond song to actually
win, appropriate in 007’s 50th year, don’t you think?
THe WiNNeR: “Skyfall” from Skyfall, Adele Adkins and
Paul Epworth
THe COMPeTiTiON: “Before My Time” from Chasing Ice,
music and lyrics by J. Ralph; “Everybody Needs a
Best Friend” from Ted, music by Walter Murphy, lyrics
by Seth MacFarlane; “Pi’s Lullaby” from Life of Pi,
music by Mychael Danna, lyrics by Bombay Jayashri;
“Suddenly” from Les Misérables, music by ClaudeMichel Schönberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer and
Alain Boublil

BesT sOuND eDiTiNG
The sound categories are rarely completely understood by the membership at large that gets to vote in
all categories, but again, the technical achievement
and challenges of Life of Pi probably prevail over a
worthy ﬁeld that could include another bow to James
Bond but probably won’t.
THe WiNNeR: Life of Pi, Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton
THe COMPeTiTiON: Argo, Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van
der Ryn; Django Unchained, Wylie Stateman; Skyfall,
Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers; Zero Dark
Thirty, Paul N. J. Ottosson

BesT visual eFFeCTs
This one’s a runaway. The biggest sure thing on the
ballot. Even at the Oscar Nominees Luncheon when
the name ﬁrst came up, there was a big whoop and
applause from the voter-heavy audience. And it ran
over the competition at the VES awards, too.
THe WiNNeR: Life of Pi, Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume
Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer, and Donald R. Elliott
THe COMPeTiTiON: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Joe
Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton, and R.
Christopher White; Marvel’s The Avengers, Janek
Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams, and Dan Sudick;
Prometheus, Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood,
Charley Henley, and Martin Hill; Snow White and the
Huntsman, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan,
Neil Corbould, and Michael Dawson

BesT DOCuMeNTaRY sHORT suBJeCT
As usual, this category has a strong list of heavyweight topics, but it’s likely between Mondays at Racine,
a touching ﬁlm about a beauty shop that opens its
doors once a week to cancer patients, and Open Heart,
about a group of Rwandan children being ﬂown to
the only free medical center in Africa for treatment
of heart disease. In a year that features more than
one contender dealing with the pain and problems of
aging, Kings Point might also have a shot.

BesT sOuND MiXiNG

THe WiNNeR: Open Heart

Life of Pi might very well take the sound category, but
here musicals often triumph, and what greater sound
mixing achievement was there this year than blending
nearly unprecedented live singing with other sound
elements in Les Mis? Among other things, they had
to bring an entire orchestra in during post to match
the songs.

THe COMPeTiTiON: Inocente, Kings Point,
Mondays at Racine, Redemption

This is a very rich category, and for the ﬁrst time,
DVD screeners of the contenders here and in liveaction short (as well as feature docs) were sent to the
entire membership, rather than allowing voting only
at special screenings where all ﬁve noms are shown.
With a Simpsons ’toon from Fox, as well as a Disney
Animation Studios title in the mix, those studios
with large numbers of Academy voters could have
the advantage, especially if those studios’ Academy
members stay loyal to their home team. That could
put others here—such as the charming and remarkably accomplished British student stopmotion animated entry Head Over Heels, about a longtime married
couple who have grown apart literally and ﬁguratively—at a disadvantage. And Disney’s Paperman is
equally wonderful giving it frontrunner status, as it
also played theatrically earlier in the year. However,
Goliath doesn’t always beat David so….
THe WiNNeR: Head Over Heels
THe COMPeTiTiON: Adam and Dog, Fresh Guacamole, Maggie
Simpson in The Longest Daycare, Paperman

BesT live aCTiON sHORT FilM
A generally intriguing group of ﬁlms, most with
a strong international ﬂavor, provide great showcases for some potentially major new directors.
Particularly cinematic are Death of a Shadow, Asad, and
Afghanistan’s remarkably ﬁne and memorable entry,
Buzkashi Boys.
THe WiNNeR: Buzkashi Boys
THe COMPeTiTiON: Asad, Curfew, Death of a Shadow, Henry

The Five Nominated Directors on the Challenges of Bringing Their Ideas to Fruition

OsCaR PeDiGRee: He has two nominations this year for screenwriting and direction. Previously, 2009’s The White Ribbon
received two noms for best foreign language ﬁlm and cinematography.
BiRDs aND DeaTH: “The pigeon. You can’t direct a pigeon. At
most, you can entice it to move it a certain way by placing corn
on the ground. But even then, it won’t obey your instructions.
Of course I’m joking when I say that. The most difﬁcult scene
in the ﬁlm is the one in which (Georges) suffocates (his wife).
The scene is preceded by a 10-minute monologue. And JeanLouis Trintignant had a broken wrist at that time, so we had
to shoot around that. And Emmanuelle Riva was concerned
about her safety physically. So it was difﬁcult for everyone

involved,” says the Amour director.
NO sHaMe: When directing Emmanuelle Riva’s nude shower
scene in which she is assisted by a healthcare worker, Haneke
explains: “As a director, it wasn’t difﬁcult for me. It was far
more uncomfortable for her. But it was clear from the beginning that it was necessary to shoot this scene—to capture the
fragility of her situation. My job as a director was to make sure
I didn’t betray her, that she wasn’t shown critically or depicted
in an unpleasant light, but just to show what people in such
situations have to go through.”

QUEST

Ang Lee (left) with actor Suraj Sharma

BY Paul BROWNFielD

aNG lee | liFe oF Pi
OsCaR PeDiGRee: In addition to best picture and directing
nominations this year, Ang Lee won a 2005 best directing
Oscar for Brokeback Mountain. He was nominated in the directing and best picture categories for 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, which won best foreign language ﬁlm. His 1995 ﬁlm
Sense and Sensibility rallied seven Oscar noms, including best
picture, and a win for Emma Thompson’s adapted screenplay
of Jane Austen’s novel, but Lee was overlooked in the directing
category. In addition, Lee’s 1993 ﬁlms The Wedding Banquet and
1994’s Eat Drink Man Woman were the Taiwanese submissions
during their respective years and nominated in the best foreign
language ﬁlm category.
POWeR OF PeRsuasiON: “Tom Rothman at Fox pitched (it to) me
as a family movie,” Lee recalls. “I asked, ‘Why do you want to
spend this kind of money?’ Because I’ve been in this business
long enough to know that’s probably not going to be true. Tom
said, ‘It’s a family movie.’ I said, ‘What do you mean a family
movie?’ He said, ‘What happened to you when you ﬁrst read
the book?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I introduced it to my wife and
my family.”
sOlviNG PI: “I started to get hooked on, ‘How do you crack
this thing? How do you examine illusion within illusion?’
We all know movies are based on illusions—the image, the
emotional ride—but how do you do that while you’re examining the power of storytelling? Once I started to think about

the solution, I got hooked. And I thought of 3D maybe adding
another dimension. The whole thing could open up; what
doesn’t make sense could make sense. And I thought of the
older Pi telling stories, so I have the ﬁrst person going through
the story while the third person is examining it, but they’re the
same person.”
lONG DaYs siNKs sHiP: “The most challenging scene to direct
and produce was the freighter sinking sequence. What was
involved was the ocean, rain, lightning, and wind. We weren’t
out at sea; we were in a wave tank that we created in Taiwan.
We spent 78 days on that scene. It was a two-year preparation, so it was a big undertaking,” Lee told AwardsLine at
the PGA Awards.
HaRNessiNG visuals: “With new media (3D), nobody really can
give you advice. People who have done it will tell you what it’s
about. It will turn out most of that is not true. I took lessons,
I took advice. But next year, people will look at this ﬁlm and
say, ‘Oh, he should have done something different.’ This is
that new to us. It hasn’t been established in the audience’s
mind. There are things like conversion points, you can make
adjustments later, but how you frame it, how you separate the
camera, the volume of depth, you have to decide on the set.
You’re doing something you don’t know, how that depth works
with the lens. You just don’t know, you’re guessing. That’s the
scary thing.”

Continued on next page...

Q UE S T

David O. Russell (center) on set

BY aNTHONY D’alessaNDRO

DaviD O. Russell | Silver liningS Playbook
OsCaR PeDiGRee: He has two nominations this year for directing and best adapted screenplay. He was previously nominated
for directing 2010’s The Fighter.
PaT JR. COMes HOMe: “The ﬁrst scene where Pat Jr. faces his
dad was challenging because that establishes the entire tone of
the picture. I directed it many different ways. Because Bradley
(Cooper) had to create that character, we tried him more
bipolar and less bipolar, with more Asperger traits and less,
being more explosive with his father and more loving. We were
ﬁnding that balance. We were also establishing the whole setup
of the movie, because the mother is taking Pat Jr. out early, the
father is a bookmaker, which is something I did in the adaptation. I chose to follow the 2008 season and locked into that,
as it availed us of a lot of interesting information that I heard
from Philadelphia Eagles fans, such as (wide receiver) DeSean
Jackson. From that, we have Pat Jr. wearing his jersey. DeSean
spiking the ball on the one-yard line is literally a metaphor for
snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, which symbolizes
the Eagles’ struggle and symbolizes Pat Jr.’s struggle. I made

Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) a bookmaker because the economy
collapsed in 2008. In the book, one doesn’t really know exactly
what he did. I imagined he was a DHL Express manager of a
hub, and he retired and lost his pension, which happened to
a lot of people. His obsession in the book with bookmaking is
just an obsession, but in the movie, it’s an obsession that goes
to the economic livelihood of the house. So in that opening
scene, establishing the tone and characters was extremely
important.”
TiFFaNY MaKes HeR GRaND eNTRaNCe: “The scene where Tiffany
(Jennifer Lawrence) comes in the house for the ﬁrst time was
also crucial in getting the emotional content to land hard. We
collide the agendas. We invented the best friend, Randy, who
is the nemesis who bets against Pat Sr. The nemesis’ role is
important as he loves the wife and always thinks she’s beautiful. It also creates the world of the neighborhood. I loved
that all the characters travel by foot. Nobody gets in the car
unless Pat Jr. goes to therapy. They even walk to the dance.”

Continued on next page...

14

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

Q UES T

Steven Spielberg (center) on set

BY MiKe FleMiNG JR.

sTeveN sPielBeRG | linColn
OsCaR PeDiGRee: Eight picture nominations, one win for
1993’s Schindler’s List. Seven directing nominations, two wins
for Schindler and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg also has a
1986 Irving G. Thalberg Memorial award.
iNTiMaTe seTTiNG: “The difference between Lincoln and Schindler’s
List and Saving Private Ryan is that the last two ﬁlms take place
outside,” Spielberg says. “Lincoln is within the intimacy of a set
in actual, practical locations. So every room was like a library.
It was quiet, there was not a lot of room to work. We didn’t
want to tear down walls and suddenly have the actors see the
entire crew and monitors just glaring at us from 20 yards away.
So even the sets that Rick Carter built—he built a good deal
of sets for this—did not have wild ceilings or wild walls. With
Schindler’s List, I wanted actors to step out of character, step off
the set, to return to reality as often as possible. It was different
on Lincoln. It’s a beautiful literary piece.”
NO DRaMa iN THe Civil WaR: “The ﬁrst screenplay draft I showed
to Daniel Day-Lewis (in 2001-02) was also not a biopic. It
was more like a Civil War drama. It was the story of the last
three years of the Civil War, and it involved seven huge battles.
Lincoln was prosecuting the war, ﬁrst through Gen. McClellan
and then Gen. Grant. But it was much more of a Saving Private
Ryan, set between 1863 and 1865. And it quickly wore thin
on me and became clear that it was not the story I wanted
to tell. It took Tony (Kushner) and I a long time ﬁguring out
what part of Lincoln’s life would be able to give audiences
an appreciation and understanding of his humanity, to take
him off his alabaster pedestal and Mt. Rushmore to be able
16

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

to understand that he was someone that could and should be
related to. And that was not doable with the Civil War in his
way. James McPherson, the great Civil War historian, once
said that the Civil War is so vast that even a gigantic ﬁgure
like Abraham Lincoln could get lost in it. And McPherson was
absolutely right; Lincoln got lost in my ﬁrst attempt to tell the
story of the Civil War through his eyes, and I jettisoned that
project within a year.”
lONG sTORY sHORT: “This was going to be a story of his last
three years, but the script was 550 pages long. For me, the
most compelling part of that screenplay was a 65-page
section which was the struggle to pass the 13th amendment
that abolished slavery. Tony and I found that the more real
estate of Lincoln’s life we covered, the more it diminished
him as someone who understood politics, personalities, and
political theater. And it took us away from his family. It took
us away from the deep cold depths he would ﬁnd himself
in that some people thought was his form of depression. It
took us away from that because it covered too much territory. The Emancipation Proclamation and the struggle to ﬁnd
the right time to announce it, the Gettysburg Address—there
were so many bullet points in Lincoln’s life that actually the
more that we spread over 550 pages, the more superﬁcial
his character felt. Once we focused everything on two great
issues, the passing of the 13th amendment and ending the
Civil War, everything got a lot more concentrated and a lot
more focused.”
Continued on next page...

11

ACADEMY AWARD
NOMINATIONS INCLUDING
®

BEST PICTURE

Produced by GIL NETTER • ANG LEE • DAVID WOMARK

Q UE S T

Benh Zeitlin (left) with actress Quvenzhané Wallis

BY DiaNe HaiTHMaN

BeNH ZeiTliN | beaSTS oF THe SoUTHern WilD
OsCaR PeDiGRee: Beasts marks Zeitlin’s ﬁrst nominations in the
directing and best adapted screenplay categories.
THe BeasTs OF THe BP Oil sPill: “A lot of our sets were on the
wrong side of the barriers that they put up to block the oil, so
we actually had to be in negotiations with BP to get a lot of
our sets,” Zeitlin says. “There were incredibly difﬁcult hoops
to jump through, but they were looking so bad in the media
they were actually uncharacteristically, I would say, willing to
cooperate. Actually, it was amazing that we managed to get
back there. Anything for good PR at that time, they were going
to do. We used that to our advantage.”
CasTiNG WiTHOuT PReCONCePTiONs: “It’s part of the idea of (my
ﬁlm company) Core 13, to not just write something and ﬁll in
the blanks, it’s about trying to work on these ideas and concepts
and work on trying to ﬁnd the essence of the character, to

18

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

search for that essence in somebody. When you are looking for
something in that way, you can ﬁnd it in unexpected places. We
wanted to stay open to what we might ﬁnd out in the world.
We deﬁnitely had written the character as a girl—we wanted
it to be a girl and focused on casting girls—but within that, we
looked at a tremendous variety of people. If you see a brave
little boy, you think it might work, but obviously we found a
pretty great little girl. We were rehearsing at the bakery in the
mornings so that Dwight Henry could get his work done. That
was key to his taking the role—he had turned it down several
times. On set, we tried to make sure that it felt like a game for
Quvenzhané Wallis at all times. We tried to shelter her from
the panic of a ﬁlm set. We always tried to maintain energy on
the set that a 5-year-old would want to be part of.”

The Anna Karenina design team had to switch
gears fast when director Joe Wright decided
to set Anna’s oppressive high-society world
inside a theater instead of shooting on location in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Money
talked; location shooting would have blasted
the ﬁlm’s modest $31 million budget.
Production designers had only 12 weeks to
create interior and exterior “locations” that
could exist within the conﬁnes of a theater
set. In this stylized approach, the movie
audience is aware of the theater, but the
movie characters are not. The walls around
Anna become literal, not ﬁgurative. “A
Rubik’s Cube is often how we described this
ﬁlm: You’d twist it and then, suddenly, you’d
twist it again, and it would just fall apart
in your mind,” says production designer
Sarah Greenwood. “You’re not just making
pretty pictures here; you are telling a very
big story.” Greenwood and set decorator
Katie Spencer talk about putting together
the puzzle of the living room set for the
Moscow home of Oblonsky, Anna’s brother.
F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

1

This scale model of the Oblonsky house stands
inside the larger Oblonsky living room set, which
in turn stands inside the larger theater set. Designers
liken the layers of interiors (and meaning) to Russian
nesting dolls. Keira Knightley’s Anna and the children
look like giants trapped inside the ornate small-scale
house. Although she is visiting her brother’s family
in Moscow, Anna, from St. Petersburg, still appears
caged the way she is in her own austere home and
loveless marriage.

2

Greenwood and Spencer designed this colorful,
richly textured interior to contrast Anna’s life
in St. Petersburg with her brother’s life in Moscow.
Greenwood says that during this period, Moscow
borrowed from the exotic Eastern style of the Ottoman
Empire and was “rejoicing in its Russian-ness,” whereas
design was more spare and Western in St. Petersburg.
The chaotic scatter of pillows, musical instruments,
and children’s toys also highlights the difference
between the earthy, boisterous Oblonsky home
and the passionless lifestyle of the Karenina family.

3

This little theater-in-a-box is a child’s toy, but
also represents a scale model of the larger theater
set. Inside the small theater, the stage is set for The
Nutcracker ballet (a detail audiences might never notice,
but that became a fun project for art department
assistant Martha Parker). Another insider’s treat: The
little blocks on the ministage are a miniature version
of the medium-sized alphabet blocks Levin uses to

propose to Kitty in a later scene. Completing the
trio: On this set, up high and to the right, are several
alphabet blocks in a larger size.

4

The designers call this gold chair and footstool “transition pieces” from the living room
set to the theater’s backstage area, represented by
the empty picture frames and painted ﬂats stacked
behind and alongside the chair. Light streams into
the theater through a window piled with snow. In the
movie, this prop-shop area is the theater’s basement,
but the actual set was built on the same level as the
rest of the theater spaces. The chair is draped with a
100-year-old real leopard skin rented for the production (law would prevent the use of a new fur from
an endangered species). In late 19th-century Moscow,
Spencer observes, there was no such thing as too
much opulence, or too much gold leaf.

5

The doll ﬁts into the story, but also pays homage
to director Joe Wright’s upbringing. The English
director’s parents founded Little Angel Theater, a
puppet theater in Islington. “The doll she’s holding
is a puppet, and that little puppet was made by Joe
Wright’s mother,” says Spencer. “Keira (as Anna)
also uses the puppet when she talks about when she
was ﬁrst married and how she believed in love.”

1

5

2

3

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

N O T E S
Production designer Dan Hennah—nominated for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
with set decorators Ra Vincent and Simon
Bright—says that this set for hobbit Bilbo
Baggins’ comfy parlor is one of few that did
not require a CGI extension to accommodate both fantasy elements and the movie’s
large band of characters, who tend to
appear together in many scenes. And even
the simplest of sets required ﬁnetuning to
meet the demands of 3D. By phone from
New Zealand, Hennah talked about this
scene in which Bilbo (Martin Freeman) talks
with Dwalin (Graham McTavish) as the
dwarf slurps his way through Bilbo’s carefully hoarded food supply.

4

Design Teams Pull Back the Curtain
on this Season’s Contenders

1

Bilbo’s parlor had to be built twice: Once in
“hobbit scale” and once in a .76 “wizard scale”
for Gandalf (Ian McKellen), so Gandalf would
appear to be too tall for his surroundings, whereas
for the hobbits it would be, as Goldilocks might have
observed, “just right.” Hennah says the less dramatic
difference in size between hobbits and dwarves was
taken care of by casting: Most actors portraying
dwarves are taller than Freeman.

2

Hobbits hate adventure, so Bilbo’s home is full of
things that make him feel safe: A warm teapot,
a full larder, his favorite books. “This is 60 years
before The Lord of the Rings, when he was sort of an
old guy who had accumulated a lot of stuff and was
sort of untidy; this was more (for) a casual, homely
bachelor,” Hennah says. For The Hobbit, Hennah’s
team took advantage of the fact that New Zealand
can boast more traditional craftspeople than a
Renaissance Fair. “We had potters and glass blowers
and pipe makers and book binders. New Zealand is
a great place for alternative lifestyles, and that often
translates into making something that you can sell,”
he explains. The designers created their own fantasy
era rooted in 17th-century England, but “once you
make up the rules, you have to stick with them or you
break the spell,” Hennah says.

3

That’s no rubber ﬁsh that Dwalin is noshing
on: It’s the real deal, caught by one of the prop
dressers who’d been out just that morning trying his

luck in the local bay. “There were probably quite a
few real ﬁsh, we were cooking them up” to use on
set, Hennah says. Since dead ﬁsh are like houseguests
(best if they don’t stay around too long), the crew kept
plenty of ice on hand to keep them fresh.

4

Often books on sets have authentic bindings but
blank pages. But Bilbo, Hennah says, “is sort of
a learned chap” who loves to read, so his books can’t
hide on the shelf. Plus he’s writing his own book, There
and Back Again, using a quill pen. A calligrapher with
quill expertise was called in to create the book pages.
And the calligrapher worked overtime on a document used in another scene at Bilbo’s home, when he
reads over the alarming contract he must sign before
accompanying the dwarves on their dangerous quest
to reclaim Lonely Mountain from the dragon.

5

The Hobbit was shot in 3D using a high-speed 48
frames per second (normal 2D speed is 24 fps).
Some ﬁlm critics thought the images created by the
high-speed process were too sharp, making The Hobbit
look more like a videogame than a feature ﬁlm.
Critical taste aside, Hennah says that extra clarity
required more careful attention to items in the background or middle ground that would have appeared
out of focus in regular 2D. Plus, 3D tends to desaturate colors, so everything had to be made in brighter
colors than it appears.

1
2

5

4

3

LES MISÉRABLES

P R O D U C T I O N
The set for an empty street—easy, right? Not
when you’re working on the movie version of
the hit stage musical Les Misérables for director Tom Hooper (2010’s Academy Award
winner for The King’s Speech). Production
designer Eve Stewart says Hooper was such
a stickler for authenticity in re-creating
1832 Paris that, for the ﬁrst few days, “there
was an awful lot of horse poo about—real
horse poo.” To avoid a rebellion on the part
of cast and crew, real horse droppings were
quickly replaced with fakes. By phone from
London, Stewart talked about this and other
challenges in creating just the right look for
Rue de la Chanvrerie as described in Victor
Hugo’s classic novel.

1

Buildings in 1832 Paris, the year of the June
Rebellion depicted in the ﬁlm, “were still very
medieval, not like the Paris you see now,” says
Stewart, who was able to ﬁnd historic newspaper
pictures to use as guides. Tall buildings lined streets so
narrow that people could throw furniture out upper
windows and quickly create a barricade. These buildings, constructed at London’s Pinewood Studios, are
40 to 50 feet high. “It was actually cheaper to build
them that height than to do it by computer,” Stewart
says. More modern Parisian streets were made wider,
says Stewart, so revolutionaries could no longer block
passage “with a couple of armchairs.”

2

The buildings are not only tall, they lean and sag
in all directions. “What was really difﬁcult for me
was to persuade the usual perfectionist carpenters
and plasterers to make everything crooked,” Stewart
explains. “It was really important to have all the buildings look like exhausted, tired, stricken members of
the community.” Stewart used mostly salvage wood
and old doors to help create the downtrodden look.

3

The cobblestone street is wet after a summer
storm, the backdrop for the dying Éponine’s
big song, “A Little Fall of Rain.” Because songs were
performed live, the roofs of buildings were carpeted
to mute the “raindrops” falling from water machines
hanging from grids on the studio ceiling. In fact,

22

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

Stewart says, many design details, including horses’
hooves, carriage wheels, and beads, had to be “made
rubbery” or coated to avoid clops, clacks, and clinks
during live musical performances.

4

This sign for an ophthalmologist’s shop has a
literal meaning as well as a symbolic one. Circa
1832, “making spectacles was quite a big business in
Paris, especially in the backstreets. It was described in
Hugo’s novel, so I was keen to get it in,” Stewart says.
The eye also plays into an attempt to introduce a subtle
religious motif throughout the ﬁlm: “Quite often
you’ll see a little cross, the eye of the Lord, individual
bits and pieces to show the greater spirit of the Lord.”

5

Other signs of the times: As described in Hugo’s
novel, Parisian streets were teeming with businesses that promoted their wares by hanging posters
and graphics and even painting directly on plaster
walls. As in the case of the sagging buildings, Stewart
wanted a naturalistic imperfection, so she hired an
80-year-old English sign writer, Graham Prentice,
to do the lettering, rather than a scenic artist. “I was
very keen to get slightly wonky sign-writing,” Stewart
says. “He’d walk around in his old Parisian overalls. It
was part of the joy of that set. It was a little community. Carpenters and painters would take pride in their
own buildings: ‘Ours was better.’ ”

5
4

3

3

2

N O T E S
It was, in the words of production designer
David Gropman, “a very large endeavor for
a very short moment.” For Ang Lee’s Life
of Pi, designers created a faithful reproduction of the real-life Piscine Molitor in Paris
in the 1950s. The set did not get much
screen time, but Gropman says Lee insisted
that the pool be fully rendered as an important key to the story. Pi was named after the
swimming pool (full name Piscine Molitor
Patel). Besides explaining Pi’s odd moniker,
Gropman says Lee wanted to explain Pi’s
ability to master the water and his alarming
companion at sea, an adult Bengal tiger. Pi’s
father survived polio as a young boy so he
could not swim, but “he was happy to see
his son be able to, not realizing it would one
day save his life,” Gropman says.

1

6

1

The scene begins with a closeup of the Piscine
Molitor sign. As a youth, Pi adopts the nickname
to avoid having fellow students call him “Pissing”
instead of Piscine.

2

At ﬁrst, ﬁlmmakers considered renovating the
real Piscine Molitor, once a world-famous attraction but now a piece of derelict architecture occasionally used for fashion shows and special events. But
prohibitive costs led to creating a pool set to exact
dimensions on the tarmac of an airport in Taiwan
that the production crew had turned into studios and
soundstages. A portion of the pool was dug 5 feet
deep and ﬁlled with water so actors could actually
take a dip.

3

On the right side of the frame, the design team
constructed an actual replica of the three stories
of dressing rooms that ﬂank the real Piscine Molitor.
On the left, the matching bank of dressing rooms is
a CGI extension. On both sides, the people and their
beach umbrellas are real.

4

LIFE OF PI

While designers took pains to replicate the exact
dimensions and design of the pool, dressing
rooms, and decks, all bets were off when it came to the
skyline, a fantasy Paris featuring landmarks including
the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame (neither are visible
from the real Piscine Molitor). “We took tremendous

liberties with that skyline,” the designer says with
a laugh, adding that they wanted the look of a
picture postcard.

5

Color plays a signiﬁcant role in the ﬁlm’s design.
Blue, white, and orange dominate, both in this
scene and later scenes of Pi and his tiger companion
lost at sea. “I knew that blue—between the ocean,
the pool, and the sky—was going to be a very strong
color,” Gropman says. “The interior of a lifeboat is
orange so it can be spotted from far away—not to
mention having a Bengal tiger, who is a very orange
fellow himself. The hard white you see in the Piscine
Molitor is echoed in the outside of the lifeboat.” An
aqua shade popular in the 1950s colors the beach
umbrellas and turns up in the elegant swimwear along
with coordinating pastel yellows, greens, and pinks.

6

What role did the 3D play for the designers?
Gropman says Lee insisted that he and his supervising art director attend a master class in the technique. Lee did very little in the way of 3D tricks, that
is, having objects suddenly pop out of the screen—
rather, he asked Gropman to use the 3D perspective
to create an illusion akin to the depth of a theater
stage. “It’s a 3D approach, but borrowed from a much
older tradition,” Gropman says. The pool structure
is “very much a frame with four walls, the ﬁrst one
being the proscenium, where the balcony is.”

1

4
5

3
6
2

LINCOLN

P R O D U C T I O N
Veteran set decorator Jim Erickson, nominated with production designer Rick Carter
for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, has a thing
about authenticity. He once hunted down
a collector of vintage candy wrappers to
ﬁnd just the right wrapper to reproduce
for the movie Love Field (well, almost: He
wanted a 1964 Butterﬁnger from Texas, but
settled for a 1964 model found in Arkansas).
Erickson took pleasure in creating authentic White House interiors because Lincoln
was the ﬁrst U.S. president whose life was
well documented in photographs. Erickson
talked to AwardsLine about the detailed work
that went into re-creating Lincoln’s ofﬁce.

1

Lincoln was shot in Virginia using many reallife historic sites, but the Lincoln ofﬁce was recreated on a set using photos as the guide. “We scaled
off the pattern of the wallpaper and had it all designed
and silk-screened. We worked up a pattern that was
as close as we could actually get without having a real
piece of it in front of us,” Erickson says. Erickson
was able to ﬁnd Carter & Company, a Richmond

24

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

business with a staff of four that provides wallpaper
for museums and historic homes and could do reproductions at a reasonable price. “Silkscreen is how they
did wallpaper back then. It can create metallics and
glazes a computer can’t do. The computer can give
you images, but not the texture.”

2

During her White House tenure, Laura Bush
remodeled what is known as the Lincoln Bedroom
“but was really his ofﬁce,” Erickson explains. The
First Lady had hired an East Coast design ﬁrm to
weave an authentic carpet. “We just contacted them,
and they made us a carpet. (Mrs. Bush) had used her
own color scheme, and it was very tasteful, but we
wanted to get back to the original.”

3

Erickson is often displeased with the lighting in
period ﬁlms because it’s anachronistically bright.
So when cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (also
nominated) arrived for his ﬁrst meeting, Erickson,
who had acquired a vintage gas light ﬁxture, set it up
and lit it in a dark room. “And I said, ‘Janusz, this is
how much light a gas light gave back then.’ I like to
think I inﬂuenced him in some way. He did a brilliant
job.” The gas line for the lamp on Lincoln’s meeting
table goes up to attach to a chandelier outside the
frame of the image.

N O T E S
4

Even if the audience can’t see the details, all maps
and documents are meticulous copies of the originals. While the average viewer might not notice when
it’s done right, Erickson says, when something is not
accurate, it jumps out like a neon light. Plus, the actors
need authenticity to get into character. “When I ﬁrst
started out in ﬁlm, prop people were famous for putting
in gag props. That is so disrespectful to the actor to do
that, it just indicates that you don’t take their work seriously. Even the minutes for these meetings people had
that were in their portfolios were the actual minutes,
because these minutes were documented so well.”

5

Erickson says he cringed at the idea of buying
period antique furniture, expecting it to be too
expensive. He ﬁgured reproductions would have
to sufﬁce. Instead, “I did really well because there
was an antique auction every week in Richmond—
Wednesday, I think—and it was like a prop house for
me. Also this Victorian furniture is very out of fashion
right now, so it was ridiculously cheap. I’d go there
every week and buy a truckload.”

6

Erickson can’t take credit for the iconic stovepipe hat—talk to the costume department. But,
he says, “I think all of us who are nominated should
wear them to the Oscars.”

eveNT
Oscar Producers Craig Zadan
and Neil Meron Are Looking to Uphold Tradition and Modernize the Telecast
BY PeTe HaMMOND

Craig Zadan (left) and Neil Meron

Oscar telecast producers Craig Zadan and Neil
Meron know their stuff when it comes to putting on a
show. With huge musical successes in movies (Chicago,
Hairspray, Footloose), TV (The Music Man, Cinderella), and
Broadway (Promises Promises, How to Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying), they have the chops to pull off
the ﬁlm industry’s biggest night of the year, though it
has sometimes proved a pitfall for other producers. It
can be challenging when the Academy mandates that
valuable airtime goes to all 24 categories, including
sound mixers, makeup and hairstylists, and producers of documentary short subjects, to name a few. But
that doesn’t faze this veteran producing pair who say
they started assembling the show’s elements from the
day they got the job in late August.
“We certainly are going to be celebrating the nominees and winners like a regular Oscar show, but they
are ﬁtting into the design of the show that we’ve
created, so there’s going to be an enormous amount
of entertainment,” Zadan says, pointing to the 50
years of James Bond tribute they have announced,
which won’t be a reunion of the actors who played
007 despite rampant media speculation. “It’s something else, something very unique and very exciting
but no, we’re not getting the Bonds together.”
Among other entertainment spots planned is a tribute
to the movie musicals of the past decade, including this year’s best picture contender Les Misérables,
Dreamgirls (I hear with Jennifer Hudson performing),
and the producers’ own best picture champ, Chicago.
And singing on an Oscar show for the ﬁrst time in 36
years will be Barbra Streisand. My bet is she’ll sing
“The Way We Were” in honor of its late composer Marvin Hamlisch, though the producers are not
offering speciﬁcs on that one.
Both producers say they’re eagerly anticipating seeing
ﬁrst-time host Seth MacFarlane take the stage. “He
has great charm. He embodies kind of a post-millennium host in that tradition of Johnny Carson, Bob
Hope, and Billy Crystal. He is the next step in terms
of making the show current,” Meron says about the
reason why the Family Guy and Ted creator got the job.

26

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

In fact, MacFarlane’s oversized teddy bear Ted has
already conﬁrmed an appearance on the telecast
alongside his costar Mark Wahlberg. In addition
to being a ﬁrst-time host, MacFarlane is a ﬁrsttime nominee as cowriter of Ted’s main title song,
“Everybody Needs a Best Friend.” Norah Jones will
sing it on the show, as the producers have also decided
to bring back the tradition of having all ﬁve nominated tunes sung live. Among them, pop superstar
Adele will be singing the hit nominee “Skyfall” and
performing on television for the ﬁrst time since she
swept the Grammys a year ago.

‘‘

(PasT) PRODuCeRs
OF THe sHOW ReallY TOOK
CHaNCes aND sHOOK THiNGs
uP all THROuGH THe COuRse
OF OsCaR HisTORY.

’’

nominations announcement with Emma Stone were
decidedly mixed. Some Academy members thought
he went too far with his jokes, others thought it wasn’t
appropriate to mock nominees just as they were
becoming known for the ﬁrst time. “It’s a ruthless bit
of scrutiny you’re under, so I’m not going to think
about that. I’m just worrying about making it as funny
as it can be and as fun as it can be,” MacFarlane said
shortly after the nomination announcement.
For Zadan and Meron, however, it’s all about putting
on the best show possible. In preparation, Meron says
he watched 40 previous Oscar telecasts. He has great
respect for the producers and what they tried to do.
“What I learned is that (past) producers of the show
really took chances and shook things up all through
the course of Oscar history,” he explains. “It really is
a great tradition to be a part of.”

Don Mischer, 15-time Emmy winner and a producer
of the Oscars for the past two years, is returning to
direct. “If you can put entertainment around the
awards and maintain the dignity of the Academy, or
put some humor and a little bit of irreverence around
it, you can make it more entertaining, and it makes
for a better show. I think (Zadan and Meron) are
really on track to do that,” Mischer says.
Academy president Hawk Koch, who hired the
producing pair, says they have gotten rid of a lot of
what he calls “shoe leather.” “We are going to present
all the categories, but between Craig and Neil and I,
we have found a way to move it along,” he says.
There’s added pressure this year because of the wellreviewed performance of Golden Globes hosts Tina
Fey and Amy Poehler, which help push ratings up
24% compared to last year. The Academy certainly
does not want to come up short in comparisons with
that NBC show.
As for MacFarlane, he has a good attitude even though
reviews of his “performance” hosting the Academy

Frank Capra
The 11th Academy Awards took place Feb. 23, 1939,
in downtown Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel. Although
no speciﬁc emcee steered the ship, the evening began
with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,”
and Basil Rathbone introduced Frank Capra as
president of the Academy. Just days before, Capra
had threatened to resign and boycott the ceremony
in an effort to get the studios to recognize the Screen
Directors Guild. He ended up prevailing over
Motion Picture Producers Association president
Joe Schenck—going so far as to follow him to Santa
Anita Racetrack after Schenck missed a scheduled
meeting. Capra’s ﬁlm You Can’t Take It With You won
picture and directing prizes; Spencer Tracy (Boys
Town) and Bette Davis (Jezebel) won lead acting prizes;
and supporting honors went to Walter Brennan for
Kentucky and Fay Bainter for Jezebel.

William Wyler
The 32nd Academy Awards took place April 4, 1960,
at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood and was
hosted by Bob Hope. MGM’s Ben-Hur won 11 of
the 12 Oscars for which it was nominated, including picture and director for William Wyler, lead
actor for Charlton Heston, and supporting actor
for Hugh Grifﬁth. It was the second year in a row
that the Culver City studio took home best picture
after previously winning for Gigi, and Ben-Hur broke
the record of most Oscars in a single evening. Lead
actress honors went to Simone Signoret—the ﬁrst
actress to win for a foreign ﬁlm—for Room at the Top,
while the supporting Oscar was awarded to Shelley
Winters for The Diary of Anne Frank.

THe DiReCTORs
The 33rd Academy Awards took place April 17, 1961, at the Santa Monica Civic
Auditorium, with the ever-present Bob Hope serving as emcee. It was the ﬁrst time
the show had taken place outside of Los Angeles or Hollywood in three decades.
The ceremony also marked the beginning of ABC’s half-century association with the
Oscars, with ABC winning broadcast rights to the show. Billy Wilder won picture and
director Oscars for The Apartment, though neither of his nominated actors, Shirley
MacLaine nor Jack Lemmon, earned trophies. Best actor was Burt Lancaster, and
supporting actress was Shirley Jones, both for Elmer Gantry; lead actress went to
Elizabeth Taylor for Butterﬁeld 8; and supporting actor was Peter Ustinov for Spartacus.

The 54th Academy Awards were held March 29, 1982,
at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, hosted by Johnny
Carson, who had held the reins since 1979. The two
major prizes were split, with Chariots of Fire earning
best picture and Warren Beatty winning for directing Reds, a ﬁlm that some thought would win both
awards. Henry Fonda won best actor for On Golden
Pond, though he was too frail to attend the ceremony;
Katharine Hepburn won her fourth Oscar for her
lead in the same ﬁlm; John Gielgud won a supporting trophy for Arthur; and Maureen Stapleton won for
her supporting role in Reds. After thanking two other
nominees, Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, in his
acceptance speech, Beatty turned his attention to the
studio executives who greenlit his ﬁlm.

“I do want to name Mr. Barry Diller who
runs Paramount, Mr. Dick Zimbert
who’s been very kind to me, Mr. Frank
Mancuso, and Mr. Charles Bluhdorn
who runs Gulf + Western and God
knows what else. And I want to say
to you gentlemen that no matter
how much we might have liked to
have strangled each other from time
to time, I think that your decision,
taken in the great capitalistic tower of
Gulf + Western, to finance a 3½-hour
romance which attempts to reveal for
the first time just something of the
beginnings of American socialism and
American communism, reflects credit
not only upon you, I think it reflects
credit upon Hollywood and the movie
business wherever that is. And I think
that it reflects more particular credit
on the freedom of expression that we
have in our American society and the
lack of censorship that we have from
the government or the people who put
up the money. Thanks.”
Warren Beatty accepting his directing trophy for Reds. He also took
home the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1999.

The 58th Academy Awards took place March 24,
1986, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with Jane
Fonda, Alan Alda, and Robin Williams serving as
hosts. Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa won seven
Oscars out of 11 total nominations, a virtual sweep,
although neither of its nominated leads—Meryl
Streep nor Robert Redford—won for their roles.
Lead actor honors went to William Hurt for The Kiss
of the Spider Woman, and lead actress was Geraldine
Page for The Trip to Bountiful. Don Ameche earned
the supporting actor Oscar for Cocoon, while Anjelica
Huston took home a supporting actress trophy for
Prizzi’s Honor.

“Thank you very much. Frank Price made this film possible.
He had the courage when it mattered the most and was easy
to say no. I knew it was impossible to get a screenplay from
this material, so I didn’t try; Kurt Luedtke didn’t know it was
impossible and so he did it. David Rayfiel kept us honest.
Meryl, Bob, Klaus, and Malick brought those characters to
life and made an incredible world. All of us being helped
all the time by Terry Clegg who kept us going. I had a team
of editors who locked themselves in a room with me seven
days a week, 12 hours a day and behaved as though nothing
else in the world existed. John Barry made it all sing. Karen

Blixen lived that life and turned it into art and taught a
generation a new way to write prose. My wife, Claire, gave
me more encouragement than I have any right to have, put
up with more, was more tolerant. I’m indebted to all of
them. I can’t leave this podium without saying, I could not
have made this film without Meryl Streep. She is astounding
personally, professionally, in all ways, and I can’t thank her
enough. Thank you.”
Sydney Pollack accepting his directing Oscar for Out of Africa,
for which he won a second producing trophy that same evening
when the ﬁlm was named best picture.

OuT OF
BOuNDs
Visual Effects Are Transcending
the Action and Sci-Fi Genres,
Becoming a Seamless
Part of Storytelling
This year’s nominees show how
visual effects have spread from
summer blockbusters to genres as
diverse as superheroes, different
ﬂavors of fantasy, more traditional
sci-ﬁ territory, and even the art-house
ﬁlm. For each nominee, there’s a
moment that makes it worthy of an
Oscar nomination. Here, the visualeffects supervisors on the nominated
ﬁlms break down the key challenges
and talk about the sequence that
clinched the nomination.

TeCH BReaKTHROuGH: The complexity and number of
techniques used to create the digital creatures. “It’s
a combination of lots of things to get a creature to
that point,” says Letteri. “It’s muscles, it’s skin, it’s
facial capture, it’s performance capture.” All those
things had to come together to bring to convincing
life six leading digital characters with dialogue.

TeCH BReaKTHROuGH: Two of the major visual
elements were done mostly with digital effects: The
water and the tiger. “It was just pushing the bar
for the realism of the tiger and the other animals
involved, trying to blend water from a tank into CG
water in stereo was a challenge,” says Westenhofer.

DeFiNiNG THe aesTHeTiC: “We were grounded in the
Middle Earth we had established for The Lord of
the Rings,” says Letteri. “For the landscapes and the
environments, we wanted to extend that Tolkienesque feeling, borrowing from what we had on
the previous ﬁlm, trying to keep the same look for
Rivendell, for example, but kind of expanding it.
Same thing with Gollum—we were trying to keep
his same look, but bring him into a new dimension
of what we could do 10 years on.”
BiGGesT CHalleNGe: The quantity of digital characters. “You’ve got dialogue, you’ve got personalities,
you’ve got unique looks,” says Letteri. “You’ve got to
have everything working: You’ve got to have the fur
working, the eyes, the skin, the muscles, the performances—not only the capture but the animation side.”
THe CliNCHeR: The confrontation between Martin
Freeman’s Bilbo and Gollum, played via motion
capture by Andy Serkis. “We all had a bit of nervousness going into creating (Gollum) because we had
done him 10 years ago, and we spent so much time
in the last 10 years really trying to delve into what
makes a performance resonate with an audience,”
says Letteri. “You’ve got here a nine-minute dialogue
scene with a real character and a digital character,
and it’s watchable in a way that keeps you engaged
the whole way through.”

DeFiNiNG THe aesTHeTiC: Westenhofer describes the
look of the effects as “hyper-dreamlike reality.” “It’s
a story being told by Pi, so there’s an element of his
recollection and the human’s ability to exaggerate
when they recollect,” he says. “That allows for a bit
of stylization in the amount of color and detail.”
BiGGesT CHalleNGe: It’s a toss-up between the water
and the animals. “Fourteen percent of the animals
were real and the rest were digital, and we often cut
back to back between them, so it forced our hand
to make the matches as perfect as possible,” says
Westenhofer. “Everything from the moment they set
sail to when he lands on the beach, it’s a boy on a
boat in front of a blue screen.”
THe CliNCHeR: A shot where Pi pulls the tiger’s head
into his lap and pets it. “We shot him on the boat in
a gimbal, and he pulls a blue sock into his lap and
he pets the blue sock. And we replaced that with our
digital tiger, ﬁtting in the animation to what he did.
In stereo, it had to be perfectly precise to line up with
everything, and then we had to animate the hair to
respond to his hand as it moves back and forth.”

TeCH BReaKTHROuGH: The Hulk. “We leveraged on
previous digital characters we had done, but really
had to rebuild and improve the way our characters
move, making it incredibly accurate in terms of the
way the skeleton under his skin drives his muscles,
which then drives his skin,” says White.

TeCH BReaKTHROuGH: The speciﬁc look director
Ridley Scott wanted for the alien creatures
required redeveloping some commonly used tools.
“We had to do a lot of work to really develop our
subsurface scatter lighting technique to get that deep
translucency that matched the prosthetics we were
using live on set,” says Stammers.

TeCH BReaKTHROuGH: The extensive use of macrophotography in CG visual effects. “It’s very tricky to
do macrophotography in a full CG shot, especially
when you look at an animal or something close up
like that, close up on the eye,” says Nicolas-Troyan.
“That’s something that people don’t really realize
when they see the movie, but if you pay attention
you see there’s a lot of macro shots.”

DeFiNiNG THe aesTHeTiC: Invisible was the watchword
from director Joss Whedon, a point deﬁned by the ﬁnal
battle in New York City that was shot almost entirely
elsewhere. “Even though very little of the movie is shot
in New York City—some is Cleveland, where we did
simpler set extensions, and then a signiﬁcant portion
was shot on a green-screen stage in New Mexico—
those are things where we didn’t want the audience
to even know there are visual effects,” says White.
BiGGesT CHalleNGe: The Hulk. “There’s a deep
ravine to cross there, where it doesn’t look good for
quite a long time, and it takes an incredible amount
of artistry by the artists working on the shots to make
it what it ultimately became,” says White.
THe CliNCHeR: The climactic battle in New York. White
says ILM spent about eight weeks shooting some
2,000 virtual background spheres—extremely highresolution photographs—from streets and rooftops
that were projected onto geography of the city as the
basis for the digital city. To this was added the digital
aliens and plates of the actors shot, as well as the details
required to sell the scene as a full-on battle. “As we put
our shots together of, say, Captain America talking to
Black Widow, we really wanted to push it toward this
feeling of being in the center of a battle. So in every
shot we added additional smoke and dust and little
embers going through the scene, just trying to really
capture that feel of being in the middle of a disaster.”

DeFiNiNG THe aesTHeTiC: The look of the alien landscape of LV-223 deﬁned the look of the whole
ﬁlm and was something Scott was quite passionate
about. “What we ended up with is this montage of
two landscapes that he really liked. And then beyond
that, we added additional mountains and sky that
was very full of fast-moving clouds, and so you get a
sense of constantly fast-moving layers of clouds and
bad weather, (then) we could paint the landscape
with fast-moving patches of sunlight.”
BiGGesT CHalleNGe: Stammers says the production
only had three days to shoot all the references
needed at Wadi Rum, Jordan, requiring an
incredibly detailed plan. “We planned it out based
on our Google Earth map of the location to the
point where, for every take that we needed to shoot,
we had a helicopter plan of altitude and GPS start
and end point, so that we could go to each of the
speciﬁc points and ﬁlm the elements we needed in
order to map out the terrain and texture it.”
THe CliNCHeR: Everything came together in the shot
of the Prometheus landing on LV-223. “We spent
somewhere in the region of 300 or 400 days just on
the texture work alone, just to get the level of detail
we needed to sell the scale of it,” says Stammers. “All
the elements come together in that one shot that we
see throughout the rest of the ﬁlm as well.”

DeFiNiNG THe aesTHeTiC: Director Rupert Sanders set
a distinct tone that required all the visual effects to
be based in reality but juxtaposed with unusual situations or actions. “Everything is based on things that
exist in the world,” says Nicolas-Troyan. “They might
not be in the same place in the world, so we put them
all together in this one spot, but they all do exist.”
BiGGesT CHalleNGe: Finding a way to make eight
actors appear as dwarves on schedule and on
budget. “We were always going to pick the right
technique and the most efﬁcient technique for the
shot,” says Brennan. “That goes all the way from
old-school in-camera tricks to using risers to vary
the heights of people, working with prosthetics and
costumes to make people appear a little bit different,
all the way up to very complex effects like head and
face replacements.”
THe CliNCHeR: The pursuit through the Enchanted
Forest, which encompassed all the techniques used in
the movie. “Something like 70 percent or 80 percent
of the animals that we created for the movie are in
that scene, and they are everywhere,” says NicolasTroyan. “There’s birds, plants, and then within those
scenes you have the dwarves, so we had to use pretty
much all our techniques for the dwarves.”

The Best Score Category Is Dominated by One Five-Time Oscar Winner: John Williams

34

Leaving artistic issues aside, you could—at ﬁrst
glance—say that the competition for best original
score isn’t a fair ﬁght this year. Three of the nominees—Mychael Danna (Life of Pi), Alexandre Desplat
(Argo), and Thomas Newman (Skyfall)—have never
won an Oscar, and one of them (Danna) is enjoying his ﬁrst nomination. Dario Marianelli won once
before, but his nom for Anna Karenina is only his third.
So who’s the heavyweight in the ring? None other
than John Williams (Lincoln), who has won ﬁve Oscars
for original score, as well as one for adapted score.

So where does that leave us this time around? A case
can be made for the lately hyper-proliﬁc Desplat,
who also wrote the scores to this year’s best picture
nominee Zero Dark Thirty and original screenplay
nominee Moonrise Kingdom. And the talk of Argo
walking off with the best picture statuette could add
some kick. But two years ago, Desplat was up for The
King’s Speech, which landed the big prize even as he
emerged empty handed. Indeed, in the past dozen
years, only three ﬁlms have secured both the best
picture Oscar and the prize for best score.

Williams is basking in his 39th nomination for original score. His ﬁrst was for The Reivers (1969), starring
Steve McQueen. His closest competitor within this
group is Newman, who is savoring his ninth nom
since 1994, when he earned two—for Little Women
and The Shawshank Redemption. Desplat is suiting up
for his ﬁfth round since 2006, when The Queen ﬁrst
brought him close to Oscar gold.

Still, the Academy has shown a fondness for novel
instrumentation. Slumdog Millionaire took the award
four years ago, and the year before that, Marianelli
won for Atonement, in which he ingeniously incorporated a typewriter into his music. For his part,
Desplat seamlessly weaves into the Argo score a mix of
Middle Eastern instruments—including the ney, oud,
kemenche, and ethnic percussion.

Though virtually omnipresent on the Oscar ballot
from 1990 to 2005, Williams has been less visible
since the 2006 ﬁlm year, though this year marks the
second in a row in which he’s back on the ballot—
and last year, he was there twice: For The Adventures of
Tintin and War Horse. As for this bunch going mano a
mano, Williams was absent the ﬁrst year Newman was
nommed, but since then—in 1999, 2002, and 2004—
neither won when the other was also in competition. And the same was true the one year, 2005, that
Williams and Marianelli previously duked it out—the
younger composer’s ﬁrst time in the ring. Newman
and Desplat have also sparred before—in 2006,
the latter’s Oscar debut, and 2008—with neither
emerging victorious.

Newman, an heir to Hollywood’s most storied ﬁlmscore dynasty, has the most noms without a win in this
quintet, so accrued good will could be a factor in his
favor. But Skyfall is the latest entry in the James Bond
franchise, and some of the ﬁlm’s most memorable
cues were written by others—including John Barry,
a four-time score winner who was never even nominated for his Bond music.

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

Given the Academy’s penchant for sentimentality and
tradition, some might write off the idea that a ﬁrsttime nominee—in this case Danna, also nommed
for best song—could win, but Oscar history suggests
otherwise. For the past two years, the statuette for
score has gone to an Oscar debutant—Ludovic

Bource (The Artist) last year and Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross (The Social Network) the year before. In
fact, from 2000 on, seven of the 12 winners had never
been nominated before their ﬁrst victory.
Yet Marianelli offers formidable competition with his
endlessly inventive score to what could have been a
very tired subject, Anna Karenina. Without ever sounding forced, his music to Anna is consistently, often
surprisingly, catchy—something the Academy seems
to favor given recent winners like Bource for The Artist,
Michael Giacchino for Up (2009), and A.R. Rahman
for Slumdog Millionaire (2008).
That leaves Williams, now 81, the grand old man
of Hollywood ﬁlm scoring. He hasn’t won an Oscar
since Schindler’s List (1993), which could bode well
for him a la Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. (Oscar
loves a comeback.) And his score for Lincoln is topdrawer—anthemic, comfortable, and ideally suited to
the subject. But Williams has been amply recognized
already for his contributions to cinema, and unless
the Academy intends to send a valedictory message, it
might choose to spread the love. That’s certainly been
the pattern in recent years. Once a far more predictable category, best score’s days as a bellwether seem a
thing of the past. But that’s no bad thing, because the
Oscars need upsets, too.

‘‘

BesT sCORe’s DaYs
as a BellWeTHeR seeM a
THiNG OF THe PasT.

universalpicturesawards.com

ÂŠ 2012
UNIVERSAL
STUDIOS

ARGO

CuTTiNG

CReW
Nominated Film Editors
Reveal the Pivotal Scenes
That Made Their Films Click

The ﬁlm editing race is both diverse and
expected. All ﬁve nominated ﬁlms are also
up for best picture, and the individual
editors range from three-time Oscar
winner Michael Kahn to several ﬁrsttime nominees and one nominee, William
Goldenberg, nominated for work on two
separate ﬁlms.
We talked with the nominated editors and
asked them to run through a key scene
from their ﬁlms—one that was crucial to
making the picture work, either from a
tone perspective or a more technical one.
The results were as diverse as the nominated ﬁlms themselves.

BY THOMas J. McleaN

36

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

WilliaM GOlDeNBeRG | argo
Goldenberg says Argo’s incongruous quality was epitomized in an often bizarre sequence that cuts from
the elaborate table-read of the fake screenplay at
the Beverly Hills Hotel to the houseguests trying to
entertain themselves in their long isolation to Iranian
forces frightening hostages at the U.S. Embassy in
Iran with a mock execution.
“When I read the script, I thought this was a scene
where if we can make this work tonally, the movie
will work,” says Goldenberg. “Because it’s all these
different tones colliding together, and if all these
expositions can work as a scene, then I think what
we’re trying to do with the movie will be successful.”
Starting with actual news footage from the era,
Goldenberg built the sequence slowly as each
segment was shot. “The ﬁrst cut of it was really
strong, and Ben (Afﬂeck) really liked it. But then we
had too much of the mock assassination and maybe
too much newsreel footage. Then we had too much
of the houseguests. And it’s a process of over weeks
and weeks and weeks of honing and ﬁnetuning and
shaping and trying to make sure that the story points
we wanted to highlight were being highlighted and
that it was clear that this is a mock execution.”

Unlike most ﬁlms, their luxury was time in the schedule for reﬂection. “(Afﬂeck) has an editing room at his
house, and we don’t live that far from each other so I
was able to go up there on Sundays when it was a little
calmer. We were able to sit calmly and look through
the footage, and it was more about what direction the
movie was going and how it would inform the next
week’s work,” says Goldenberg, who says he ﬁnished
editing the ﬁlm in June. “I think it was helpful for him.
I think it was helpful for me obviously to get reactions.
You’re always nervous as an editor about how a director’s going to react to your cut footage initially.”

TiM sQuYRes | liFe oF Pi
Keeping the story moving was a challenge on Ang
Lee’s Life of Pi, which was shot with extensive visual
effects for the tiger and in stereoscopic 3D. The ﬁlm
focused on simplicity in its storytelling, with fewer
than 1,000 shots in its two-hour running time.
Squyres says the scene in which Pi, played by Suraj
Sharma, tries to train the tiger with a stick in order
to ensure his own survival was tough. “The tricky
thing with a scene like that, it’s really all about the
content of the scene itself,” says Squyres. “I’m basically cutting from Pi to the tiger to Pi to the tiger.
There’s a couple places where I kind of go out to a
wide shot, but essentially, there’s not much I can do
editorially to ramp up the scene.

Complicating that is that one of the performers—the
tiger—was a mixture of shots of more than one real
tiger and a CG tiger.
The scene was prevized in a general way, and Squyres
says he consulted on set with Lee more than on any of
their other ﬁlms to ensure they got what they needed.
“There were a number of little beats of action that
we dropped,” he says. “We kept modifying it and
tightening it, and we at one point did decide we were
stretching things a bit much. It went through a bunch
of changes, but that’s editing.”

LINCOLN

LIFE OF PI
“So in order for the scene to be riveting, interesting,
exciting, and important,” Squyres continues, “I have
to pace it, and I have to go with the best moments
from Suraj’s performance, because he’s doing a
combination of things: He’s trying to look strong and
conﬁdent, but at the same time as an actor he’s trying
to show underneath that he’s terriﬁed.”

MiCHael KaHN | linColn
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is, like the famous president
at the story’s core, a deliberate creature. The movie
alternately gets intimate with the 16th president, and
pulls back to give the broader view of the man and
his achievements.
Few sequences in the ﬁlm exemplify editor Michael
Kahn’s contributions to the movie as a scene in which
Lincoln visits a military hospital in the company of
his son, Robert. The establishing shots show the pair
riding up to the hospital sitting opposite each other
in silence in a horse-drawn carriage, cutting closer as
Robert tells his father that seeing the injured soldiers
will not alter his plan to enlist. Undeterred and unsurprised, Lincoln leaves his son in the carriage while he
enters the hospital.
Cutting back to Robert, who sits alone outside, a
covered wheelbarrow pushed by two soldiers draws
his attention. Curious, Robert gets out of the carriage
and looks down to see the wheelbarrow has left a
bloody trail. He follows and watches the soldiers
unveil the severed human limbs in the wheelbarrow
and dump it into a large pit with others. Kahn then
cuts in close on Robert, who despite his bravery is
rattled, and turns back in the cold winter sunshine.

Kahn then goes in tight on Robert’s hands, as he
fumbles an attempt to roll a cigarette, tears forming
in his eyes as he tosses aside the rolling papers and
tobacco in frustration. When Lincoln asks him what’s
wrong, he towers over the crouching Robert, the
camera alternately showing Lincoln as a towering
ﬁgure whose shadow crosses that of his son and as a
man looking down and offering a way to help.
Robert stands to make his argument, and Kahn cuts
to a wider shot of the men. Kahn then goes in tighter
and alternates more quickly from Robert to Lincoln
as the argument heats up, with Lincoln’s slap across
his son’s cheek coming as both a surprise and the
deliberate act of a man who knows what he’s doing.
Lincoln immediately tries to comfort his son, who
pushes him away as Kahn cuts to a wide shot, while
Robert storms away from his father and declares his
intention to enlist in the military no matter what.
Lincoln takes the news solemnly, turning away from
the crowds on the street and looking downward,
muttering to himself.

Continued on next page...

...from previous

CuTTiNG CReW

ZERO DARK THIRTY

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
JaY CassiDY & CRisPiN sTRuTHeRs
Silver liningS Playbook
Director David O. Russell sees editing as a continuation of the writing process, with an excellent
example being how a speciﬁc music choice shaped
a key sequence in which Pat Jr., played by Bradley
Cooper, returns home after meeting Tiffany (Jennifer
Lawrence) and manically tears the house apart
looking for his wedding video, ultimately ending up
in a physical altercation with his father, played by
Robert De Niro.
“A lot of it was driven by the music,” says Cassidy.
“The ﬁrst versions of the scene were done where—
and this would make sense from a story point of
view—he would hear the trigger music in his head,
the Stevie Wonder song that had triggered him in the
doctor’s ofﬁce. So it made sense to build the scene
that way, and we could never get that to work.”
The breakthrough came when Russell suggested
they try cutting it using the Led Zeppelin song
“What Is and What Should Never Be.” “It’s Led
Zeppelin—you can’t cut the music, it’s sacrosanct,”
says Struthers. “And then we looked at the themes
again, and we looked at the cuts and did everything
to just shape it to the manic nature of the song,
which seemed to ﬁt perfectly with Bradley’s mood
at the time.”
“Once we had done that, it uniﬁed the whole idea of
the night,” says Cassidy. “It wasn’t several scenes in a
row, it was this one explosion which then had some

38

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

ring out, which is basically Bob (De Niro) going next
door chasing the neighborhood kid with the camera.”
Helping out the process was Russell’s working
methods, which involve keeping cameras rolling for
multiple resets with the actors.
“In the dailies of these 20-minute takes, we can kind
of see the evolution of this scene,” says Struthers.
“You can see the amazing performances he gets out
of these actors, the rhythms they get into. But we can
also see how David and the cameraman are getting
into rhythm, too, and how they’re ﬁguring it out as
they go along.”

DYlaN TiCHeNOR & WilliaM GOlDeNBeRG
Zero Dark THirTy
The sheer volume of footage shot for Zero Dark
Thirty required director Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal to bring on Goldenberg to
shape the movie about the decade-long hunt for 9/11
terrorist attack leader Osama bin Laden.
No section of the movie was less formed than a key
middle sequence following the mechanics of the
hunt, as the CIA seeks out the phone number to al
Qaeda courier Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti’s mother and
use it to locate ﬁrst Ahmed and then the compound
where bin Laden himself is staying.
“It could have derailed the movie, and I think it
turned into a really strong section,” says Tichenor.
“There are sections of it that count for two to three

minutes of screen time, but there were three days of
dailies—three long days of dailies, just to see it all and
ﬁguring what went in and what went out.”
Making sure each shot had a point and communicated clearly the plot was another trick. “There was
a lot of discussion about how much of that story we
needed to tell, and if we needed to show if he had
a cell phone at all,” says Tichenor. “One day we
condensed it down to shorter than it is in the movie.
We thought we had unlocked it, we had ﬁgured out a
way to really shorthand the story and make it exciting. And as I looked at it and looked at it, I thought,
‘Uh oh, it doesn’t make sense.’ ”
“In the unraveling of it, we found a midway point
that was where the movie ended up in structure. In
a weird way, we had to take a giant step backward to
take a step forward. It was that misstep that led us to
the key to unlock the sequence,” Tichenor says.
“One part of that sequence that Dylan and I won
a major battle with (was) the sequence (that) begins
with Daniel, Jason Clarke’s character, (getting) a
phone number for Abu Ahmed. And the next section
starts with this trap and trade section where you get
a rough idea of the overwhelming scope of ﬁnding
people and ﬁnding these phone numbers and the
global scale of it. That was never in the script. Dylan
and I both felt strongly we needed to see something happen, we needed to see somebody in a big
server room, we needed to see the process a bit,”
says Goldenberg.

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE - BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
®

WINNER

BEST PROD. DESIGN • BEST EDITORIAL

GOLDEN GLOBE
® HFPA

ANNIE AWARD

WINNER

4WINNER

VISUAL EFFECTS SOCIETY

®

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

INCLUD ING

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

PRODUCERS GUILD AWARD

BRITISH ACADEMY
OF FILM AND TELEVISION ARTS

CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARD

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

N O M I N AT I O N

N O M I N AT I O N

MPSE GOLDEN REEL

ACE EDDIE AWARD

CINEMA AUDIO SOCIETY

BEST SOUND FX EDITING

BEST FILM EDITING

BEST SOUND MIXING

N O M I N AT I O N

N O M I N AT I O N

N O M I N AT I O N

1
3

FROM THe
sOuRCe
Translating a Book to Film
Can Mean Plot Changes
Both Big and Small

DaviD O. Russell | Silver liningS Playbook
A book’s narrative has all the time in the world to
lay out its plot points, but what was key for David
O. Russell in adapting Matthew Quick’s novel Silver
Linings Playbook was “creating a dramatic engine in the
screenplay that propels the story into third act.” One
of his key changes from book to script revolved around
Pat Jr.’s discovery that his ex-wife Nikki never wrote
him a letter—a gesture that he initially perceives as
an opportunity to makeup. In the screenplay, Pat Jr.
deduces on his own that Tiffany wrote the Nikki letter,
while in the novel, Tiffany makes the big reveal to him.
Russell deconstructs his reasons for making the change:

person who has lived in an institution for four
years. God bless those people, but I don’t know
them. I know from my own life, the one we
portrayed was my son. I wanted to talk about
that guy who is the whole motivation for this
picture. He has a manner about him in the
book that is different. I decided (along with
Bradley Cooper) that he was a lucid guy who,
like many bipolar people, when they’re not on
their medication, they distort things and go
into unrealistic expectations.”

2 “Pat Jr. learns about Tiffany writing the Nikki

letters very late in the book. Tiffany hasn’t
exchanged the letter yet. She holds it out until
after the dance. So it was a big structural decision in the ﬁlm to make the dance the climax of
the movie and to make the letters the currency
of their relationship and the barter at the heart
of their intimacy.”

3 “The curtain opens on the third act where

Tiffany and the parents are plotting to lie to
Pat Jr. while he ﬁgures out on the porch the
truth behind Nikki’s letter. You have to build

40

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

your pressure into the canister of the movie.
Not only is Pat Jr. getting the news that Nikki
isn’t available, but he’s also realizing he’s been
lied to. That’s humiliating to him. The shame
can alone trigger a bipolar episode. In fact, he’s
created the conditions where people have to
tiptoe around him.”

1 “In the book, he’s a completely delusional

4

“It all makes sense, the secrecy of the dance and
the letters. There are so many people trying
to help and supervise people like Pat Jr., that
the dignity of their privacy and the dignity of
them making decisions without telling anyone
becomes extremely valuable to them. In fact,
it’s the most important human dignity. So that
was a decision we made—for Pat Jr. to ﬁgure
out for himself (that Tiffany wrote the letters).
He doesn’t tell anyone—not the audience or
the characters—what he’s going to do. It’s a
moment that he turns a corner and starts to
own his own life.”
—Anthony D’Alessandro

134.

life of Pi

Chris Terrio (right) with Ben Afﬂeck

DaviD MaGee | liFe oF Pi
In the novel Life of Pi, there is a scene in which
Pi’s father illustrates to his boys that animals are
dangerous by feeding a live goat to one of the tigers
in the family zoo. Though that sequence did not
make it into his adaptation, Magee says it became the
inspiration for how to pinpoint a key moment in the
ﬁlm’s early dramatic structure—namely, the ﬁrst time
Pi meets Richard Parker, the tiger with whom he will
later be adrift at sea.
“It’s handled very differently in the book and used to
different effect, and it goes to the heart of what we
were trying to accomplish in the adaptation,” Magee
says. “In the book, a different tiger is fed the goat. It’s
an incident that Pi recalls from his childhood, where
the father takes the two boys in, and just to remind
them how dangerous animals are, he demonstrates by
feeding a goat to a tiger. And then he goes on in a
somewhat comical scene to explain why every animal
is dangerous in some way or the other, going from
the tiger to the antelope who could spear you with his
horns, to the turtle that snaps at you, and he works all
the way down to a guinea pig. Pi thinks the guinea pig
is a problem, too, and (the father) says, ‘No, the guinea
pig is ﬁne.’ So it’s meant as a comical scene and a
reﬂection more on how animals are not adapted to
life with humans. One of the challenges that we had

in adapting the story was ﬁnding an evolution to Pi’s
character, so that he was not just an infant traveling
out on the waters with a tiger, having faith in God
and having no reason to question why all of this was
happening to him. It works beautifully for the novel
because he could reﬂect on all sorts of aspects of
spirituality in a bunch of episodes. But we needed to
create an emotional narrative for that journey. And
so very early on, Ang (Lee) and I talked about the
possibility of turning this scene into the moment of
his disillusionment as a child, the moment where he
sees through some of the mythologies of childhood.”
—Paul Brownﬁeld

CHRis TeRRiO | argo
Chris Terrio had a trove of primary and secondary material to consult in writing the screenplay for Argo, most
notably the memoir Master of Disguise, by former CIA
agent Tony Mendez, and Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article
in Wired magazine based on declassiﬁed documents about
the remarkable clandestine Iran hostage-rescue caper.
But this hardly gave Terrio a blueprint for a screenplay
that deftly blends Hollywood satire with a historical
international crisis. Terrio says his biggest fear was
that the Hollywood scenes of the Argo screenplay
would slide the movie too far into show-business farce.

However, a passage in Mendez’s book gave him license
to go there in one case. “In Tony’s book,” Terrio says,
“there’s a passage in it where Tony’s describing being
with (makeup artist) John Chambers and ﬁguring out
that they’re going to call the fake movie Argo. And then
it describes how that title both comes from a joke—
which literally was a joke that Chambers and Tony
used to make, which is the ‘Ah, go fuck yourself ’ joke—
but also that it has these mythological connotations to
it, which Chambers and Mendez were aware of and
chose. I feel that somewhere in that passage is the root
of the tone of the ﬁlm, which in some sense was a
harder thing to get at than the particular narrative.”
In getting to that narrative, Terrio arrived at the
idea of creating a staged reading of Argo for the
Hollywood press. “You have all these people sitting
around in these ridiculous costumes and yet you have
the great mythological intonations of, ‘Our world has
changed.’ It’s a nudge and a wink, but there’s also
something earnestly mythological about it. Plus,
you have the slightly spitballing point of view of
Chambers and Tony and Lester Siegel in the room
watching this, and you’re trying to evoke the geopolitical world that they’re operating in, plus the human
drama of both the houseguests and the hostages.”
—Paul Brownﬁeld

Continued on next page...

...from previous

FROM THe
sOuRCe

beasts of the Southern Wild

linclon

luCY aliBaR & BeNH ZeiTliN
beaSTS oF THe SoUTHern WilD
Playwright Alibar and ﬁrst-time director Zeitlin call
it the Elysian Fields scene—the moment in the third
act of the screenplay when Hushpuppy leaves behind
Wink, her dying father, and seeks out her mother,
whom she believes works on a kind of ﬂoating stripper barge in the Gulf.
Juicy and Delicious, the one-act play on which Beasts is
based, was not set in the Bathtub of the Louisiana
bayou but the rural South (in the play the character
Hushpuppy is a boy). “What happened in the play,”
Zeitlin says, “was that Hushpuppy sort of wandered
into the road and hitched a ride from this mythical
truck driver that was driving down the highway, and
he brought her to this diner and this woman, who
wasn’t supposed to be the mother at all and just kind
of gave a cooking lesson.”
The cook carried over in the movie, in just as big a
way. “As we worked on the adaptation, people would
look at the script and say, ‘Where is the logical plot
justiﬁcation for Hushpuppy to leave her father who’s
the center of this story and go to a place that we’ve
never heard of before in the script and have this
bizarre experience?’ ” Zeitlin says. “That doesn’t really
ﬁt into what you think of as your instigating moment
of the third act, or whatever you hear in screenplay
school. But one of the things that I loved so much
about Lucy’s play is that it never operated on a narrative plot logic, it operated on an emotional logic.”

42

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

In the play, Alibar wanted the emotional possibility that the cook could be Hushpuppy’s mother. “If
it wasn’t, I wanted Hushpuppy to be hoping that
it was,” she says. “I think the dialogue was pretty
similar, if not exactly the same. Benh and I went back
and forth a lot with the tough love aspect of it.”
“That monologue is actually a really good example
of how the text from the play was revised into the
movie because I remember very speciﬁcally me and
Lucy taking that speech to (actress Jovan Hathaway)
and working with her on reshaping the language to
ﬁt her accent,” Zeitlin says. “In the end there is a
collaboration between me, Lucy, and Jovan, sort of
revising this speech that the waitress made in the play.
It’s more Jovan, it’s more Louisiana, but the ideas in
it and the substance of it are very much the same.”
—Paul Brownﬁeld

TONY KusHNeR | linColn
Early in the process of what would become his screenplay Lincoln, Kushner came to a scene on page 716
in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. It was a
description of Lincoln riding across a battleﬁeld, the
gory, horriﬁc ravages of war at his feet. “I got to that
scene,” Kushner says, “and I wrote in my notebook and
then emailed Steven: ‘This has to be in the movie.’ ”
Lincoln’s grim ride is followed by his conference with
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on the piazza of a house in
Petersberg. Kushner found no historical record of

their conversation, “so I felt like that’s kind of cool. I
can have them talk about what I’d liked them to have
talked about, as long as I can defend what they say to
one another, and I think I can.”
As such, Kushner chose to leave Lincoln puzzling
over what he had just seen on the battleﬁeld while in a
quieter place. “Lincoln saw a couple of battles outside
of Washington, but they were fairly small skirmishes,” Kushner says. “He saw this one battle that was
unfolding that was kind of a charge by (Confederate
Gen.) Jubal Early’s troops in July of 1864 that was
repelled. He went to meet Grant in Petersburg the
morning after this really ugly battle, which was the
end of Lee’s 10-month siege. He rode across the
battleﬁeld, which was strewn with bodies, and it was
the ﬁrst time he’d ever seen the immediate aftermath
of a battle with nothing really cleaned up. And the
description by one of the men that accompanied him,
of Lincoln sort of visibly aging on the horse as he
rode across the battleﬁeld, moved me enormously.”
The scene also gets to the heart of the sacriﬁces
necessary to maintain the union. “One of the paradoxes of Abraham Lincoln,” Kushner says, “was that
he was not a guy who took war lightly. And Grant,
whom he trusted as he trusted no one else, developed
a new kind of warfare that was incredibly bloody and
horrible, and it is what what won the war, but at a
human cost that no one had ever seen before. Lincoln
suffered this very deeply, and I felt like this was a great
moment to show that.”
—Paul Brownﬁeld

CHRIS MATTHEWS
SPEAKING ON

THE BEST MOVIE
OF THE YEAR!

“

I’VE NEVER SEEN A MORE HEARTWARMING
MOVIE ABOUT WHAT HUMANS CAN DO
TOGETHER AND HOW FAMILIES
REALLY DO STICK TOGETHER.”

THE FIRST FILM IN 31 YEARS TO RECEIVE OSCAR®
NOMINATIONS IN ALL FOUR ACTING CATEGORIES

AN ALMOST HOLY GRAIL
ACHIEVEMENT.”

“

PIERS MORGAN,

PLEASE VISIT

TWCGUILDS.COM
FOR MORE INFORMATION

OR M.TWCGUILDS.COM FOR MOBILE ACCESS

WRITTEN FOR THE SCREEN AND DIRECTED BY DAVID

O. RUSSELL

TYPE RI
RI
aMOuR
Auteurs wouldn’t be auteurs if they weren’t enigmatic, especially when it comes to deconstructing
details of their oeuvre. “Let the ﬁlm speak for itself ”
is often the motto, and for Amour director and screenwriter Michael Haneke, that’s not too far from his
own credo. However, he’s not completely inaccessible
when responding to the audience’s fervor for his work.
“It’s very difﬁcult for me to say, it was so long ago, I
can’t remember,” Haneke told AwardsLine when asked
if there were one particularly challenging scene to
write for Amour. “Generally, when it comes to screenwriting, I can say that if it’s ﬂowing, you enjoy it. If
not, it’s far less pleasant. But there’s always ambivalence—the struggle to put something there on a
blank page when there was nothing there before. If
it’s successful, you’re happy; if not, you’re depressed.”
In writing the story of 80-year-old husband Georges
who contends with his dying wife Anne’s debilitated
state, Haneke was spurred by a beloved aunt’s long and
painful battle with a degenerative condition. For the
director, the story of the elderly couple’s struggle was a
universal tragedy versus a tragic drama “about a 40-yearold couple who is coping with a child dying of cancer.”
In researching the script, Haneke met extensively with
medical specialists who work with stroke victims. His
only note to Emmanuelle Riva in terms of preparing
for the role was to undergo speech-therapy sessions
for stroke patients. Riva initially read for the part
of Anne, but Haneke had Jean-Louis Trintignant in
mind for the role of Georges and wouldn’t have made
Amour if the actor weren’t available.

44

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

“I like writing for actors who I know and respect,
and I know I can get results,” says Haneke, who has
admired Trintignant’s work since he was a teenager.
In regards to Isabelle Huppert, another Haneke
vet from such ﬁlms as The Piano Teacher and Time of
the Wolf, the director praises her talents. “She is like
a Stradivarius violin, on which you can play Bach,
Mozart, or Brahms, and it will always sound good.”

DJaNGO uNCHaiNeD

Setting the ﬁlm in one apartment “was always the
choice,” says the director. “When you get older, when
you have ill health, your life is reduced to the four
walls that you are living in. But beyond that, there
was also the challenge of dealing with a theme of this
gravity. For that, I went back to the classical use of
time, space, and action.”
Though asked by his aunt to assist with her death,
a request Haneke denied, the director-scribe asserts
that there’s nothing in Amour that he cribbed from real
life. In particular, the ﬁlm’s tragic ending.
“That’s the kind of question I never answer on principle,” says Haneke in regards to interpreting Amour’s
conclusion. “I respect my ﬁlms, and I am trying to
force the spectator with these scenes to ﬁnd their own
answers and their own interpretation of what they see
on screen. If I were to provide interpretation, I could
be wrong and robbing you of your imagination.”
Spoken like a true auteur.
—Anthony D’Alessandro, David Mermelstein

FliGHT

IGHT
IGHT

Original Screenplay Nominees Reveal
Their Most Challenging Scenes

Just as Quentin Tarantino casts extensively for the
right actor who’ll recite his dialogue properly, he is
equally exacting when it comes to the punch and snap
of his comedy scenes. And if there’s one takeaway
moment that helps ease the ultraviolent intensity in
his revisionist western Django Unchained, it’s the lynchmob scene where a gaggle of hooded Klansmen, led
by plantation owner Big Daddy (Don Johnson), plot
their attack against bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz
(Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx), who have
offed slave handlers the Brittle brothers.
“The comedy rhythm is very speciﬁc and an actor
needs to say this word and this word for a punchline
to work or for the tone to work, but I have perfect
actors,” Tarantino explains.

In Flight, screenwriter John Gatins had to ﬁgure out
how his main character, pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel
Washington), would ﬁrst cross paths with the heroin
addict Nicole, played by Kelly Reilly.
Flight is a story about an alcoholic hitting rock bottom
inside the protective shell of an act of daring heroism:
The crash-landing of a commercial ﬂight. But Gatins
says he wanted “a little bit of a two-handed narrative
in the ﬁrst half of the movie.”
Enter Nicole, a junkie on her own descent. Gatins
set their random meeting in the stairwell of a
hospital. He did not, however, expect a third character to insert himself into the scene—a young
cancer patient, played by James Badge Dale, who,
ﬁnding Whip and Nicole smoking in the stairwell,
asks to bum a cigarette and becomes “thematically a guy who comes and talks about the random

It’s a classic western comedy moment, rivaling the
campﬁre sequence in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles: The
dim-witted Klansmen debate about wearing hoods or
not, because the person who made them didn’t cut the
eye holes in the right places. For Tarantino, watching
Birth of a Nation after his Django Klansman scene is all
the more hilarious because the reality probably was
that those actors couldn’t see a thing.

Despite any outrage that Django has triggered in the
African-American media, in particular Spike Lee’s
ire, the ﬁlm was recognized by the NAACP Image
Awards with best supporting acting wins for Kerry
Washington and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as a best
picture nomination and acting nod for Jamie Foxx.
Yet from what Tarantino has observed at screenings,
it’s his bag scene that’s a clincher.

“I’m positive it’s half the reason why Amy (Pascal)
wanted to be involved in the movie because she felt
that the bag scene was so funny,” Tarantino says. “It’s
actually terrifying to write something that funny on
the page. If I write something that funny on the page
and count on Jamie (Foxx) and Sam (L. Jackson) to
say it, then I have no worries. But I had to spread
that scene out between six people, and they all had
to deliver.”

“You get a cathartic laugh from audiences, especially
black audiences, because they start giggling uncontrollably as that scene builds in its absurdity,” says
the director. “The tone of the laughter is: ‘We were
scared of these idiots?’ ”

nature of life and events that have to do with, what
do you believe?”

as a character. “There was a part of me that thought
at times that he wouldn’t survive the movie or even
the script cut, but I kind of fell immediately in love
with him. I mean, I know he was a bit of the Oracle
at Delphi, but I loved that about him, too. It was one
of those things where it’s like, ‘Well, he can just say
whatever he wants.’ Everyone has interesting reactions to that scene, which is another thing that made
me very grateful that I decided to leave it in the script,
and when (director Robert) Zemeckis and I sat down,
it was one of the ﬁrst things he wanted to talk about.
He said, ‘It’s the framework of the whole movie. It’s
important, it’s pivotal.’ ”

“Had I sat to really try to outline the entire movie, I
never would have said, ‘Oh, scene 17 is going to be
in a stairwell, and a cancer patient is going to walk
in and talk for six pages and then leave, and we’re
never going to see him again.’ But given the nature by
which I wrote this movie, with letting the story unfold
a little bit, and even though it was a little bit unwieldy
at times—it was long and I had to do a lot of cutting
and circling back and everything else—that cancer
patient was one of those happy accidents of living
in the world of (Whip’s) mind and what he might
encounter once he was there,” Gatins explains.

—Anthony D’Alessandro

—Paul Brownﬁeld

Yet even though the character simply called Gaunt
Young Man helped solidify the scene, Gatins wasn’t
necessarily sure the man would ever be fully realized

Continued on next page...

...from previous

TYPE RIGHT
RIGHT
On the lam from their parents and the authorities,
two 12-year-old lovers enlist the aid of a high-ranking
ofﬁcial in the Khaki Scouts to marry them quickly and
help them escape the forces that would return them to
adolescence. Roman Coppola, who cowrote Moonrise
Kingdom with director Wes Anderson, is quite fond of
the scene that stars his cousin, Jason Schwartzman.
Schwartzman is Uncle Ben, the aforementioned
high-ranking ofﬁcial in the Khaki Scouts. Paid off to
help the young Scout Sam and his child-bride-to-be
Suzy escape, he tells the boy: “There’s a cold-water
crabber moored off Broken Rock, the skipper owes
me an IOU, we’ll see if he can take you on as a clawcracker. Won’t be an easy life, but it’s better than
shock therapy.”
“He can’t legally wed them, but he has a certain
status due to being this high-level scout,” Coppola
says. “And his language and the way he speaks has a
distinctive manner that has to do with his position.”

MOONRise KiNGDOM

Within Uncle Ben’s blizzard of words and comic
alliteration—“cold-water crabber,” “claw-cracker”—
is the surface tone of Moonrise Kingdom, in which characters have their own verbal coding: Deadpan and
heavily formalized speech is part of the engine of a
comedy about adolescence.

The scene calls for our CIA agent heroine Maya (Jessica
Chastain) to explode at her boss in Pakistan, station
chief Joseph Bradley, over the prioritizing of resources
in the near-decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.
“It’s the day after the attempted bombing in New
York City” in 2010, screenwriter Mark Boal explains.
“We’ve watched (Maya) evolve and devolve from a
relatively innocent young ofﬁcer in the course of seven
years to this obsessively driven, committed hunter.”
Stoic for much of the ﬁlm, Maya ﬁnally sheds her
emotional armor. “It’s scripted in a way that allowed
Jessica to uncork a powerful emotional moment. So it
works on an emotional level, and she has the opportunity to really ﬂex her acting muscles and show the
strain that she’s been holding beneath this veneer of
professionalism. But it also works on a political level,
because it shows the resource allocation was so important to the story, and that the CIA was constantly torn
between the trade-off between trying to prevent an
attack and trying to achieve the longer-term goal of
ﬁnding and killing bin Laden. We know from history
that different administrations placed different priority
on that trade-off.”

ZeRO DaRK THiRTY

46

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

The hunt for bin Laden, by then, has also led to the
death of Maya’s close colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle),
killed in a suicide bombing on a U.S. base in Khost,

“The choice of words relate to the character’s function,” Coppola says. “For example, there’s the police
ofﬁcer, and the parents of Suzy are some type of
lawyers. Often in their conversations, they use legal
turns of phrase.”
Uncle Ben talks fast, in keeping with his function in the story—to conduct a quickie, unofﬁcial
wedding and get our two young lovers off the island.
Schwartzman, with little time to waste, speaks his
lines in what Coppola calls “a wonderful kind of ’40s,
Ben Hecht-ian kind of way, in this urgent blast of
dialogue.”
“When some dialogue comes out so quickly, it takes
a moment to catch up to it, so it’s a scene I enjoy
watching again and again,” Coppola continues. “The
writing of it, and seeing Wes manifest that through
his work as a director—and the actors, of course—it’s
really one of the more touching scenes for me. These
two young lovers are committed to each other, and
they want to be married. They’re willing to be on the
lam and live in a chaotic way, due to this true love.
The sentiment is rather deep and sincere, and yet it
has a very playful way that it’s presented.”
—Paul Brownﬁeld

Afghanistan. “We think of the CIA as just this faceless organization, but it’s susceptible to all the same
personal pettiness of any big corporation or any big
high school,” Boal says. “And over the years she’s lost
friends and put up with enormous frustration. And
then she ﬁnally screams at her boss.”
Although the government remains a big bureaucracy,
Boal says he also wanted to show how close CIA
agents become in this type of work. “The team that
found and killed bin Laden is a pretty small team,”
he says. “And they all, or most of them, knew each
other. It was a very personal undertaking. There’s so
much death all around on this story. You have all the
deaths in 9/11 and then subsequent deaths in Iraq
on both sides and the civilians, and Afghanistan, you
have the horrors in the black sites and everything. But
in addition to that, you have the deaths among the
CIA. There was a real historic, personal connection
between Maya and the character that’s represented
as being killed in Khost. There’s a scene in the ﬁlm
where they’re texting each other right before. They
were friends. That sort of friend-mentor relationship
in the ﬁlm I didn’t pull out of my ass—that’s real. It
just shows how personal this all was for them.”
—Paul Brownﬁeld

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE - BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
®

5

ANNIE AWARD NOMINATIONS

BRITISH ACADEMY OF FILM AND TV ARTS

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

I N C LU D I N G

CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARD NOMINATION

NOMINATION

GOLDEN GLOBE® NOMINATION

PRODUCERS GUILD AWARD NOMINATION

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE BEST ANIMATED FEATURE BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
WINNER WINNER WINNER WINNER WINNER WINNER
BEST ANIMATED FILM
BOSTON SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS

BEST ANIMATED FILM
FLORIDA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

BEST ANIMATED FILM
KANSAS CITY FILM CRITICS

BEST ANIMATED FILM
LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOC.

WINNER - ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST PICTURES
LOS ANGELES TIMES • NEW YORK POST • TIME • THE ATLANTIC • THE STAR-LEDGER • USA TODAY • CNN
CINEMA AUDIO SOCIETY

If all roads once led to Rome, then most fashion
runways now merge into the red carpet. For the past
decade or so, celebrity stylists have cherry-picked the
fashion runways for the very best frocks for their A-list
clients on awards nights. In essence, you would ﬁrst
see a gown on Kate Moss and then on Cate Blanchett.
But more recently, the trend is for actresses to show up
to the Golden Globes or Oscars in ready-to-wear or
one-of-a-kind couture gowns that haven’t yet debuted
at fashion week or the European shows. In many
instances, the red carpet is the new runway. Case in
point: The one-shoulder black-and-white column
gown that Claire Danes’ wore to the SAG Awards
came from Givenchy’s pre-fall 2013 collection.
“In an effort to trump other celebs, it’s become about
wearing something that hasn’t even been seen on the
runway yet,” says Cameron Silver, a fashion expert
known for his serrated wit and the author of the new
style encyclopedia, Decades: A Century of Fashion. “The
system is so out of control.”

F E B R UA RY 1 3 , 2 0 1 3

By system, Silver means the big, greasy machine
in which actresses and designers make exclusivity deals. Though no star or stylist will speak on the
record about such dalliances, it’s been suggested that
anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 can come sewn
into the hem of a red-carpet gown worn by a nominated actress. On a less cynical note, however, stylists
can’t be blamed for calling ﬁrst dibs on spectacular
gowns that they preview. “The advantage to using
dresses that haven’t been shown yet is that no one else
has seen them,” says the powerful Hollywood stylist
Elizabeth Stewart, whose clients include fashion risktakers Blanchett and Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain.
“There’s a better chance of a good dress not having
been snapped up.”
Wearing the right dress can be the ﬁrst business ﬂirtation between an actress and designer, too. A bit like
a wink across the room. In 2011, 14-year-old Hailee
Steinfeld was nominated for an Oscar for True Grit.
Seizing a style moment, she wore a striking fuchsia-,
tangerine-, and black-striped Prada dress with a
ﬂounced hem from the spring collection to the SAG

Awards that year. The chic choice paid off. Within
two months, Steinfeld became the new face of Miu
Miu, Prada’s edgier little-sister label. Steinfeld was
just spotted front row at the Chanel couture show in
Paris, so stay tuned.
Jewelers, of course, must deliver never-before-seen
sparklers too. Many stylists plunder the archives
of a house like Cartier or Van Cleef & Arpels for
statement pieces with heritage and vintage caché.
“Finding the new unseen look and style in a piece
of jewelry is also in top demand,” says Beverly Hills
jeweler Martin Katz, who outﬁtted Jodie Foster, Sally
Field, and Helen Hunt with lush diamond bracelets
and bold earrings at this year’s Globes. “When I
come up with unusual rings or bracelets that have not
been seen on the red carpet before, stylists grab them
immediately.”
If anyone can be held semi-responsible for all this
pushing and shoving, it’s Nicole Kidman. Back at
the Academy Awards in 1997, she hit the red carpet
in an exotic chartreuse haute couture gown by John

Jennifer Lawrence in Dior

CHiC
CONveRsiONs
Unlike runway models, very few actresses top out
at 5’11” and wear a size 2. Not to mention the fact
that many shy away from necklines that plunge to
the waist and skirts that slit to their derrieres. Here
are a few essential tweaks that often happen before
a runway frock meets the red-carpet paparazzi:
aDD sPaRKle: Designers don’t festoon their models
with a gazillion dollars worth of diamonds.

With Designer Gowns Debuting on the Red Carpet,
Awards Season Is Starting to Feel a Lot Like Fashion Week

‘‘

Galliano for Dior. (A facsimile of the dress had been
spotted just a month earlier at the Paris show and
the designer worked to customize it for Kidman.) No
doubt, every other actress on the carpet that night
later learned to pronounce “haute couture” with just
the right French ﬂourish.

iN aN eFFORT TO TRuMP
OTHeR CeleBs, iT’s BeCOMe
aBOuT WeaRiNG sOMeTHiNG
THaT HasN’T eveN BeeN
seeN ON THe RuNWaY YeT.

’’

And just as wearing never-before-seen runway dresses
has become de rigueur, über stylist-turned-designer
Rachel Zoe has upended the buffet once again.
She put longtime client Anne Hathaway in a snowwhite Chanel couture gown from 2009 at this year’s
Globes. What? A 3-year-old dress? “Just because a

dress was seen on the runway a couple of years ago
but didn’t have its moment doesn’t mean that it’s out
of fashion,” says Silver. In fact, if anything, it shows
that a resourceful stylist can gild a forgotten gown like
anyone else would lacquer an old credenza. Zoe also
put Hathaway in a black spring 2013 Giambattista
Valli couture gown for the SAG Awards this year.
Catherine Kallon, who founded the popular website
Red Carpet Fashion Awards in 2007, has been visually
comparing runway looks and their red-carpet
translations for over ﬁve years. She sniffs at any
criticism about petite Hollywood actresses being
swallowed by dresses designed for statuesque woman
with tiny ribcages. “For the most part, I think runway
dresses translate better on the red carpet,” she says.
“Just look at Lucy Liu in her Carolina Herrera gown
at the Golden Globes for further proof. She owned the
ﬂoral ball gown.”
Actually, she borrowed that gown and it was pre-fall 2013.

(all images Getty)

DiTCH THe avaNT-GaRDe eDGe: A feathered mask or
leather opera gloves would certainly freak out the
Mormons in Utah. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
wore a black Saint-Laurent Spring 2013 gown to
this year’s Golden Globes, but eschewed the black
fedora worn with it on the runway.
seCuRe THe aNaTOMiCal BauBles: Models can jiggle
like women’s-libbers circa 1970. Actresses rely on
tape and nipple covers to keep it G-rated.
lOse THe CRaZY sHOes: The runways are notorious
for showstopping, blister-inducing footwear. When
Halle Berry wore Atelier Versace from fall 2012
to this year’s Globes, she bypassed the platform
bondage boots seen on the runway for demure
nude pumps.
sMile, alReaDY: A runway model would rather bloat
two sizes than show teeth to the photographers. Every
actress—except Tilda Swinton, of course—knows
that her megawatt grin on the red carpet warms
up even the most cutting edge of couture gowns.
—Monica Corcoran Harel

Many have said 2012 has been the most remarkable
year for movies in the Oscar race in a very long time.
The dense list of quality contenders makes for quite
a race, and it’s somewhat reminiscent of another
legendary year for cinema a half-century ago.
The year 1962 was an embarrassment of riches, and
in many ways, just an embarrassment for the Academy.
Yes, they did include the year’s two best ﬁlms, To
Kill a Mockingbird and (eventual winner) Lawrence
of Arabia, in the best picture lineup and both have
endured as certiﬁed classics. Both were worthy. But
then the Academy padded out the remaining three
spots with popular studio offerings like The Longest
Day, The Music Man, and most egregiously, the bloated
Marlon Brando remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.
OK, these ﬁlms might have been decent entertainment, but were they the best the Academy could do
50 years ago? Hardly.

Opposite page, clockwise from top left: To kill a Mockingbird, The longest Day, Days of Wine and roses, Mutiny on the bounty (all images Getty)

BY PeTe HaMMOND

50

A Look Back at the

Just consider the ﬁlms that didn’t make the cut: Blake
Edwards’ Days of Wine and Roses; John Frankenheimer’s
The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz, and All
Fall Down; Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker; Robert
Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Otto
Preminger’s Advise & Consent; Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita;
John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; David
Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave—and this is just a partial list!
Was it because all these ﬁlms were in black and white?
Well, so were Mockingbird and Longest Day, so that doesn’t
explain it. Were they too challenging when compared
to the populist ﬁlms that made the cut instead? The
point is, we are still seeing, experiencing, and talking
about most of the best picture also-rans today. They
have stood the test of time, a feat perhaps greater than
ever being nominated for a best picture Oscar.
It is interesting to note that, just as the Academy has
done this year in failing to nominate the directors of

best picture nominees Argo, Les Misérables, and Zero Dark
Thirty, the Academy’s directors branch of 1962 was
just as prickly and contrarian in ignoring the directors
of three best picture nominees (Longest Day, Mutiny,
and Music Man) in favor of smaller entries like David
and Lisa, The Miracle Worker, and the foreign language
Italian ﬁlm Divorce Italian Style, which like this year’s
Austrian/French Amour also nabbed nominations for
acting and writing, winning for the latter just as Amour
could do. The directors of those best picture alsorans were every bit as worthy of the nomination they
didn’t get (Frankenheimer’s three 1962 classics should
have gotten him a nod just based on volume alone).
Some things never change. And, quite frankly, considering the advanced age of some Academy members,
many of the same people are still doing the voting.
The year 1962 was also when James Bond was introduced to the movies in Dr. No starring Sean Connery,
still one of the best of the Bonds, yet it didn’t merit
a single nomination back then. In fact, Bond has
been consistently ignored throughout the past 50
years, with just a handful of technical nominations
and awards. A half-century from the time Bond was

introduced, it seemed like it was all going to change
this year with Skyfall, which was poised to become the
ﬁrst Bond ever to earn a best picture nom. It didn’t
happen, just like it didn’t happen 50 years ago. At
least the Academy has been guilted into a special
tribute to recognize this most successful—and brilliant—of all movie franchises.
Beyond best picture, which did at least go to a very
deserving winner in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia,
the acting races across the board were gut-wrenching
cliffhangers. I can’t recall the four categories to ever
be so competitive as they were that year. For best
actor, try to choose among Gregory Peck in To Kill
a Mockingbird, Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia,
Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, Marcello
Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style, and Burt Lancaster
in Birdman of Alcatraz. If it weren’t for Peck’s iconic
Atticus Finch, which deservedly won, certainly
O’Toole would have triumphed the ﬁrst time out for
his glorious T.E. Lawrence instead of going zero for
eight and becoming Oscar’s most losing actor (thank
God they ﬁnally gave him an honorary award).

Best actress was an imposing quintet with Bette Davis
in a shocking comeback role, Lee Remick as a drunk,
Geraldine Page as a fading ﬁlm star, Katharine
Hepburn doing Eugene O’Neill, and the winner,
Anne Bancroft, training the blind Helen Keller.
Pre-Oscar bets from Hollywood experts were on
each and every one to prevail. There were duo Oscar
upsets in the supporting races, too. Virtually everyone
thought Lawrence’s Omar Sharif would win, but he
was upstaged by a career nod to Sweet Bird of Youth’s
Ed Begley. And in supporting actress, it was Angela
Lansbury as Laurence Harvey’s conspiratorial and
chilling mother in The Manchurian Candidate who was
seen as a sure thing, only to be passed over for 16-yearold Patty Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. It
was the criminally overlooked Lansbury’s to lose—and
she did, never getting another shot. Oscar fans are still
smarting, though Duke’s performance still holds up.
Sometimes Oscar races leave lasting scars. It’s about
what could have been. And in a year as good as 2012
was, will we still be arguing the outcome 50 years
from now just like we still do about ’62?

‘‘ ’’

CONsiDeRiNG
THe aDvaNCeD aGe OF sOMe
aCaDeMY MeMBeRs MaNY OF
THe saMe PeOPle aRe
sTill DOiNG THe vOTiNG.

2012-2013 AwardsLine Oscar Print Editions: Issue 10

The AwardsLine Issues bring you right into the heart of Hollywood’s most exciting time of the year. Via access to actors, directors, writers and producers, the Awardsline team will be going straight to all of the people who are in play for some of the industry’s highest honors – at all of the big events. Covered in this issue: Best Director / Best Screenplay